Listener to the Trees

As Charles Burchfield saw it, any landscape painter worthy of the name had to take his nature raw. "You cannot experience a landscape until you have known all its discomforts," he said. "You have to curse, fight mosquitoes, fall over rocks and skin your knees, be stung by nettles, scratched by grasshopper grass and pricked by brambles before you have really experienced the world of nature." He braved winter winds and rainstorms to sketch outdoors. One March day, inspired by a "glorious thaw," he trudged out to a nearby woods and had hardly set up his easel when a thunderstorm came up. "I decided nothing was going to stop my painting." he recalled later, "and hurriedly got my huge beach umbrella and my raincoat. I protected my legs with a portfolio (the wind holding it in place). And so I painted with my nose almost on the paper with thunder crashing, boughs breaking and rain falling in torrents."

Burchfield's perseverance paid off in some of the most unusual nature painting in American art. In memory of the artist, who died in 1967, the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica, N.Y., is currently displaying a 441-work retrospective. Organized by Assistant to the Director Joseph Trovato, the show ranges from schoolboy sketches to some of his last large watercolors, handsomely illuminating Burchfield's special gifts. Sweeping views and majestic scenery were not his forte. Rather, he marveled at nature's moods, the songs of crickets and cicadas, the sound of the wind in the telegraph wires, the intricate structure of a dandelion seed ball. In his view, weeds were as precious as flowers, trees had faces, houses eyes, and in their lanky, saggy way cornstalks could almost be seen to dance.

Graphic Symbols. Burchfield's love of nature verged on the mystical; more than once, he confided in the journal he kept for more than 50 years, he fled the woods in terror of mysterious presences. "I have never learned to talk and have only listened to the trees," he wrote. Born in Ashtabula. Ohio, in 1893, he grew up in Salem, where he and his sister Louise often romped in Post's Woods hunting spring flowers, a pastime he later recalled in White Violets and Coal Mine. Even then he liked to sketch, and in high school recorded all the local wildflowers. After graduation he entered the Cleveland School of Art. There, it was not modernist battles raging in Paris or at New York's Armory Show that influenced him, but Chinese scrolls and Japanese prints. Soon he was making hundreds of nature studies. Many were developed in watercolors whose flat, abstract patterns still seem precocious for a young man all but oblivious of contemporary art.

His "golden year," he judged later, was 1917, when he conceived an elaborate vocabulary of graphic symbols to portray sounds and emotions. The chirp of crickets was accomplished with a kind of jumping V-shape. Fear he saw as a hooked spiral, which can be seen at the top of the steeple in a painting he did that year, Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night. The painting was inspired by a dank winter night when he heard a booming church bell and recalled his fearful feelings on hearing the same sound as a child. He promptly went down to Salem's Baptist Church and sketched its steeple, noting that it looked like a hollow-eyed parrot, then returned another night to listen to the bells. "The whole tower seemed to vibrate with a dull roar afterwards," he wrote, "dying slowly and with a growl."

Small-Town Realism. In the 1920s, Burchfield "fell under the charm" of the American Scene writers--Willa Cather, Zona Gale, Sinclair Lewis--and for a time the old Victorian houses and humdrum streets of small-town America replaced nature on his canvas. By then, he and his wife had moved to Gardenville, N.Y., a suburb of Buffalo, where he lived for the rest of his life. Quiet and modest, Burchfield was yet a man of great emotional upheavals, alternating between despair and almost spiritual ecstasies. Eventually, Main Street palled, and in 1943 he decided to return to nature. Critics who had praised his grim realism were dismayed, but Burchfield decided that the period had been a "digression." In retrospect, he was essentially right.

He began feverishly reworking the early watercolors. His vision grew ever more exuberant as he sought to capture the patterns of heat waves in July, the crash of thunder over a landscape the cold cawing of crows, fireflies exploding like stars. Dandelion Seed Heads and the Moon, with its phantom trees in the distance and its fragile dandelions echoing the lunar rings, is an unforgettable evocation of transitory nature. Down in the lower right-hand corner, crisp as a cricket's chirp, can be seen Burchfield's colophon, an adaptation of his zodiac sign (Aries) and his initials.

"As an artist grows older," Burchfield explained, "he has to fight disillusionment and learn to establish the same relation to nature as an adult as he had when a child." That was no mean task. His greatness was that, through the alchemy of paint, he was able to restore that childhood wonder for others too. As the Institute's Joseph Trovato put rt: "It is not given to any one man to tell the whole story of the world of nature, but Burchfield tells a very important part--a part that touches us all. We will never be able to see the world in the same way again."

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