Synesthesia and Insects

    Modern art, while diverse and individual at its core, might occasionally be accused of sterility. Rothko’s swaths of geometric shapes and Matisse’s garish colors do little to ground or to soothe a viewer. They don’t give off a sense of place. Georgia O’Keefe pieces place little emphasis on  the veracity of the setting, preferring to use modeling of light to soften and curve mountains so they appear more like soft-bellied human bodies than rock. Charles Demuth’s industrial aesthetic, while particular to his time period, don’t identify with a particular landscape. It is the work of Charles E. Burchfield that most expertly identifies an American topography within modern painting. Not only does he represent real-life places in his art, but, using his unique style, he captures the entire atmosphere of a place with a verisimilitude unlike any other painter. 

    Edward Hopper once said, “The work of Charles Burchfield is most decidedly founded, not on art, but on life, and the life that he knows and loves best.” 2 Charles Burchfield most definitely found his subjects in his real life. He was born and raised in Ohio in 1893. Salem was the name of his sleepy hometown, and the focus of much of his early work. It was there he grew an appreciation for nature which would resonate through the entirety of his art career. He gained his modernist sensibilities from his studies at the Cleveland School of Art. From 1915 to 1920 he painted in a mystical and modernist style, the architecture of the natural landscape of his youth.1

    Charles Burchfield was successful within the American modernist movement.  In 1930 he became the first artist to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art: Charles Burchfield: Early Watercolors 1916-1918. They showed his early art, before he turned to modernism in the 1920s.1 Serving in the army during World War I changed his perspective and he lost what he called his “romantic fantasy” style. His new industrial style led him to be categorized as a Regionalist. In the 1940’s he returned to modernism, and in the process began to work on what he would call “reconstructions,” or pieces from his modernist youth that he began to work on once more.5

    The Insect Chorus (Fig. 1) really captures the particular fidelity that a Burchfield painting has when it comes to replicating the atmosphere of a landscape. The Insect Chorus was recently shown in a traveling exhibition called Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield organized by the Hammer Museum and the Burchfield Penney Art Center and shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art from June 4th to October 17th 2010.6 It belongs to the Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York. It was bequeathed to that institution by the great collector of modern art Edward Wales Root. The bequest was part of a larger donation of 227 works to MWPAI.9

    The painting is of a garden in front of a house with a gabled roof and prominent siding. The house’s façade is almost completely obscured by the greenery in front of it. Gestural brushstrokes above and exiting the bushes indicate a vibrational action occurring within the scene. Faded greens clash sickeningly on an off-white background and highlights of gold and white indicate a hazy sunlight. Shrubbery of exotic and fantastical shapes rises in the lower foreground. 

    It is strikingly similar in composition to another painting in the Munson Williams Proctor collection which is called Childhood’s Garden.8 The Insect Chorus demonstrates how Burchfield used watercolors to create high contrast paintings that feel like Japanese prints in how the watercolor is sharply opaque like ink in some places. In fact, he was highly influenced by Hiroshige and Hokusai, Japanese woodblock printmakers that he was introduced to during his time at the Cleveland School of Art.10

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    His brushstrokes are smooth, his lines are swirling, sharp and jittery. There is no fidelity to the accuracy of the landscape. The landscape is cartoonish and contoured. The verisimilitude of the painting lies in its portrayal of the sounds of the landscape. Charles Burchfield himself once said: “It seems at times I should be a composer of sounds, not only of rhythms and colors.  “Walking under the trees, I felt as if the color made sound.” 4 When looking at the painting, one can almost hear the crickets chirping, the hum of cicadas and see the grasshoppers jump out of the page. There are no “insects” depicted, however. It is the jagged style of the painting, the leaping vertical lines of grass, and the pointy, hairy looking black lines between them that imply the intermittent buzz of bugs. The dark shadows that define the bushes could conceal them, or they could be behind the tall grasses.  Charles Burchfield wrote of his art “An artist must paint not what he sees in nature, but what is there. To do so he must invent symbols, which, if properly used, make his work seem even more real than what is in front of him.” 2  The vibrating brushstrokes that surround the bushes in this piece are a good example of how Burchfield would use symbols to create a sensation of hyperreality. 

    Childhood’s Garden, 1917, was another bequest of Edward Root’s and was painted at the same time in the artist’s life as The Insect Chorus. It is however, a much more colorful painting, with vibrant tangerine, royal cobalt and forest green. A heavenly light breaks through storm clouds, like a memory breaks through from a haze of dreams. It is a sudden change, and one can almost hear the echoes of thunder receding in the background. The painting portrays the same synesthetic qualities as The Insect Chorus, but here they are more distinctly hallucinatory, and much more oppressive. The brightly lit flowers in the very foreground are lit almost from withiin a distinctly unrealistic manner. Here, modeling of the light comes second to the feeling that the artists wants the viewer to have, of sunlight touching and warming a rain-chilled face. The painting is unified from foreground to background by the colors present in the flowers of the foreground also being present in the green ivy slithering up the house, the cardinal red of the smokestack, the blue shadow of the storm clouds and the warm sunlight streaming down. 

    The crowded painting is louder than the The Insect Chorus, in more ways than one. The piece is a prime example of how Burchfield played with expressionistic light and color to illuminate the emotional reality of a place instead of the tangible reality of it. The title of the painting itself betrays the purpose of the painting: it is a recollection of a place, a place seen through the artist’s mind’s eye. His mind’s eye sees it as loud, sinking the house into the landscape and somewhat concussive, with the presence of the thunder clouds.

    In a letter dated November 14, 1967, President Johnson wrote “He [Burchfield] was artist to America.” 2 Burchfield painted many landscapes of his native Ohio and his home in western New York. His “romantic fantasy” was not just his own though. It belongs to the history of the places he painted, because of the way he captured a feeling that is unique to each of them. Even as Burchfield grew older and changed his style, he never forgot his early paintings. They itched at him like bugs until he went back to them and it was then that he made his finest paintings.

Works Cited

  1. “Charles Burchfield.” DC Moore Gallery, DC Moore Gallery, http://www.dcmooregallery.com/artists/charles-burchfield.
  2. “Biography > Charles E. Burchfield .” Burchfield Penney Art Center, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/charles-e-burchfield/biography/.
  3.  “Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield.” Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield | Whitney Museum of American Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, https://whitney.org/Exhibitions/CharlesBurchfield.
  4.  “Charles Burchfield.” Artnet, Artnet Worldwide Corporation, http://www.artnet.com/artists/charles-ephraim-burchfield/.
  5.  “Charles Burchfield.” Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Smithsonian, https://americanart.si.edu/artist/charles-burchfield-659https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1594612.pdf?ab_segments=0%252Fl2b_100k_with_tbsub%252Ftest&refreqid=excelsior%3A24d49e5b78621b4f165ff79413373452
  6. “The Insect Chorus.” Burchfield Penney Art Center, Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State, https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:l2010-001-007-the-insect-chorus/.
  7. Maciejunes, Nannette V., and Norine S. Hendricks. “Nurturing His Muse: The Archives of Charles Burchfield’s Creative Life.” American Art Journal, vol. 28, no. 1/2, 1997, pp. 7–81. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1594612.
  8. Ketchiff. “Childhood’s Garden.” Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, http://collections.mwpai.org/objects/11857/childhoods-garden?ctx=3b9de097-f203-489e-b298-30cde9bbb455&idx=2.
  9. Murray, Mary E. “The Insect Chorus.” Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, http://collections.mwpai.org/objects/11859/the-insect-chorus?ctx=124f7e88-44d7-4e31-a580-36ccb4b76dd9&idx=0.
  10. Alcauskas, Katherine D. “Spring Rain.” Spring Rain – Works – Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, http://wellin-emuseum.hamilton.edu/objects/7597/spring-rain?ctx=7f92da0a-b4b8-466d-b19a-c172001bb82f&idx=1.