Rural America Through The Eyes of Charles Burchfield

Charles Burchfield’s incredibly personal watercolors of rural life present a duality between the wonderful but dreadful existence of rural America left behind by industrialization. In the essay, I will show how his  background illuminates the sources of this theme in his artwork, while his influences and artistic context shows how his particular style grew, and why he is considered a one man movement. The two pieces of his art included in this essay shows how this theme manifests in two contrasting ways, first as the dreamy tranquility of rural life, then as the hopeless, abandoned existence or living in an area with no future. 

    The majority of Burchfield’s life was spent in rural settings. Burchfield was born in 1893, and grew up in Salem, Ohio, a rural town left to dwindle as industry came and went from the Rust Belt. His father died when he was five, leaving behind a single mother with six children. Following a brief stint doing camouflage painting in the Army, Burchfield attended the Cleveland School of Art, where he learned about American and European modernism, as well as Chinese and Japanese art, which all served as major influences throughout his career. Other than a six week stint in New York City, Burchfield spent his adult life living first in his hometown, before moving to the outskirts of Buffalo, New York, in 1921, where he married and spent his life until his death in 1967, at age 74.

Burchfield, while considered one of the early American modern realists, is somewhat unique in style. His themes overlap with those of Edward Hopper, his close friend, in that he depicts the negative aspects of contemporary American life. However, unlike Hopper, Burchfield did not tie himself to pure realistic representation, and instead drew from memory and gothic and romantic influences to convey the feelings of rural American life. His medium of choice was watercolors, but he treated them the same as oil paints, viewing the only difference between the mediums as what bound them, and how they were they thinned. This unique treatment of the medium separates him from both traditional watercolor painters, and most of his contemporary realists, who used oil paints as their chosen medium. While many of his paintings depict specific places from his life, it is important to note that it was not his aim to capture those places specifically, rather to use those places as settings to convey his own experiences and reality. The two pieces I’ve selected to examine: Village Lane, Morning Sunlight (The Garden Poles) (1916), and House by the Railroad (1927) show the two extremes of Burchfield’s reality and experience with rural life.

The first piece I’ve selected for examination, Village Lane, Morning Sunlight (The Garden Poles), shows a romantic take on the beauty of rural life. The watercolor was bequested to the Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute by Edward Root in 1957. It dates back to 1916, during the first phase of Burchfield’s career, which lasted from 1916-1918, a period associated with his childhood memories, and interpretations of his emotions through the landscapes that surrounded him. The landscape painting shows a dirt path lined with poles through a village filled with rundown houses and green overgrowth. The grey sky betrays the heavy sunlight that strikes the tops of the buildings and plants portrayed, which glow golden. There are no people present in the image. The buildings and plants lack texture, only having slight lines or changes in color to indicate the materials. The colors, while somewhat subdued, are all clear, and pull from a very natural palette of blues, greens, and browns, barring the gold of the sunlight. Moving further down the lane portrayed, the colors of building fade into a dark and then light blue, and shrink back, creating a sense that the lane could go on forever.

Altogether, the painting captures the serenity of the rural life. The softness of the colors and forms in the painting creates a sense of peace, as there is no harshness in the piece, whether from lines or contrasting colors, it all works together in harmony. The sunlight coating the roof and treetops of the village grants a sense of warmth. In relation to a similar painting of his, August Sunlight, Burchfield described the same sort of light effect as a “glorious moment” That glory is not a singular occurrence, not in Burchfield’s art, nor in the world. Instead, Burchfield captures a moment of clarity could have happened anywhere. The piece and feeling, while set somewhere where he felt it, is not portrayed as tied to the location where he experienced it. The setting is nondescript, no landmarks of any sort, nothing grounding it to being anywhere in particular other than a rural village path, it’s just the feeling of peace of seeing something spectacular, and having that moment to yourself.

On the other end of the spectrum of Burchfield’s art, I’ve selected House by the Railroad (1927). This piece was also bequeathed to the Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute by Edward Root in 1957. This piece, while also being a watercolor, also features black crayon drawing, and shows a dilapidated house by a telephone pole and a railroad crossing sign. There are overgrown plants and wildflowers in the foreground, which have the only real color in the entire piece, a muted yellow and green fading into grey shrubbery, in front of a grey and very faded brown house, and mostly greyscale surrounding, under a grey, cloudy sky. In contrast to Village Dawn, the black crayon draws clear, defined lines and forms in this piece, and the brushstrokes on the building are much harsher, short and straight.

This painting perfectly encaptures the bleakness of life in a rural area abandoned by industry, left to rot. It has a sense of being trapped in, cut off from the rest of the world, coming from the strict outlines of the crayon, and the isolation of the building. It’s seemingly connected tot the world, with telephone wires, and a train track nearby and a path leading to it, but there is no one on the path, no trains running by, just nothing around it but plants and what’s left behind when the world moves on. The bleakness of the color contributes to the sense of abandonment, as it seems like the color just up and left with the economy, only leaving the faintest traces that it was ever there. While their colors may be dimmed by the hopeless cloudy sky, the plants retain their life, calling back to the agrarian past and lifestyle Burchfield romanticizes in his other work, that is long gone by the time of the painting.

While these two pieces don’t encompass the total span of Burchfield’s artistic repertoire, and exclude his more dreamlike forms used in his later pieces, they capture in duality in his themes and his work, the joy and serenity and peace of rural life, and the dreadful hopeless reality of a lifestyle that has died, and the lives left behind by the industrial world. Despite the differences in the themes and styles of the two pieces, both still show the lived experience of Burchfield. He engages the viewer in his memories, and reflects on the commonalities of the American rural experience beyond himself.