Chilsonia

An artist breathes life into a picture. Burchfield has this capacity with houses of upstate New York and those in the small towns of his Ohio. They are, he tells us, typical ones, found on any lower class street. Before this, he had had another notion.

Around 1919, Charles got obsessed with seeing the world from the point of view of birds. Now, ain't that something, Charlie! Imagine to look at the universe,the planet, through the bird's eye, pardon the pun. Well, Burchfield gives it a try and says it doesn't work for him. So he turns to the buildings he sees in his region. Small town Ohio.Middle west, U.S.

See, he is trying to get at a poetics, he says, of his region, like Whitman did of his own Brooklyn, like Sandburg did. He is an American poet, only with a brush, not a line of words. So he struggles to find a subject. He locates it in scene after scene of mundane structures. He also paints pictures of ships and locomotives, in Buffalo and other spots in that part of the frigid world of winter and the fragrant world of summer.

Later he will switch to the magic pictures of bugs vibrating in nature, moons, suns and funny trees. This will be his later, then last phase, which I like much less than the earlier one of houses and stuff like choo choo trains, boats, old cars and shacks.

By looking closely at the life around him, Burchfield will find a decade of things to paint, from what he sees in his home town and surroundings. He will use his considerable talent to produce paintings we now use to commemorate and enjoy his vision.

Well, this is not about Charlie, but about Stan. A neighbor of mine in Franklin, where I now go to get my car serviced on Pleasant Street, which runs into the main street of town. A few times I went to the beautiful, town library which has a collection of Stan's movies on Franklin. I feel quite at home. Get to feel welcomed by Stan in Franklin, Massachusetts. He does a small-town art, like Charles Burchfield does. It is quiet and unobtrusive work. Art is about feeling and one is always assured that Chilson feels things. He films his community and others around it on a regular basis. His ammunition is a kind eye, a willingness to work, a need to be alone.

Good work requires tons of quiet and solitude. There comes then a noise that is really quite minor. A dull roar, a quaint din. There is a line from a contemporary Greek. "And the rabbit erect, heard the infinite."

I always have the sense that Stan is wrapped in a cloak of quiet. A plaid, shawl around his shoulders to keep the cold and the negative ghosts out of him. It is just a feeling I have that he works in a blanket of silence. He has to, to get it right. It is a requirement for what he has to try to do. Get it right. The town, and its little, daily dramas.

It is not unlike Burchfield's magnificent accomplishment. Nor that of Atget in Paris. We have Evans with his American and Cuban photos. Dorothea Lange in the Depression. Ben Shahn.

It seems to me that our best artists use a talent for seeing, and a lot of quiet inside themselves for their work. The quiet is like the earth needed to grow the flower.

I figure these terrific artists know what I mean by blessed silence.

I meet the Armenian, Arshile Gorky, as I look on his mother and on him in a 1912 photo, or I talk to poet, Paruir Sevak, and mumble his anthem on this or that. I think about Theophilos, a Greek painter in the turn of the century, as I look on his brightly colored works. In my world of books and art, there are many I know.

Charlie Burchfield is a frequent acquaintance, as is Reginald Marsh, American painter. Paul Cadmus.

There is Stan Chilson of Franklin, whose work on the neighboring town of Wrentham I know best, but whose Franklin work I am just now learning.

I talk to Louise Bourgeois, an elderly, eloquent, American painter. To a whole bunch of other people I meet in the Regis College library and at the Wellesley Free Library. That is how I mark time or pass it. I imagine that lovely silences feed my heroic artists.

The silence is punctured by noises and artistic musings that sometimes relate to place. To certain artists, places are haunting. That is true of Stan, as it is true of Burchfield and Atget. Charlie Burchfield actually says it. That "his dearest and oldest friends remained places, his favorite haunts on solitary rambles."

Looking at a place can result in a piece of art that is a flight of fancy or some reasonably accurate presentation. I prefer the last, as I can only get an idea, if it is presented in some concrete form. I like my artists representational, within a format we can call documentary. So I prefer photographers who show things you recognize. Abstract photography and art do not move me much. Chilson is one of these who shows the eternal village in all its ethereality and its reality both. The mystery is still in the representational picture.

Chilsonia, his body of works, is laden with magic, if you look at the pictures a certain way, but it sits on a bed of realism that I require, in order to make sense of his work. The magic is read in. He surprises. The body of his works is one large pleasure. For me he is a large window on the place we call our lovely Massachusetts.

He notes the change in a lifestyle and a way of being. On the surface he just seems to be showing us a view of a pretty, nice place, called home. He is very smart, wise. Knows that location, home, the homeplace, are crucial for health and survival.

Everything is in place. In lovable location. Grounding as a human being requires one to come from someplace and for Chilson it is the region in and around Franklin. He knows to stay and work in the room of quiet and has a legitimate spot to film and embrace. Franklin and environs in good ole' Massachusetts, as we find it west of Boston. Suburbs now,but something else at an earlier time. His view looks on the surface and then travels deep into what is a beautiful realm. Chilson has all sort of special stuff that he hides, which may surprise and enchant and suggest things to us.

He shows a charmed life he needs to exhibit. Old cars, a woman with a baby carriage that appears for just a second. Scene after scene of people coming down stairs and you wonder why he does that. Winter, summer and fall scenes that jar you with their local charm. Familiar things like an old man in Wrentham raising or lowering the flag on the common and you are struck with the beauty in the routineness of the act. Little things get writ large.

Stan plays small and somehow his art comes out large. Full of surprise and mystery and charm. As good art is prone to do.

Place-art like Chilson's or Burchfield's or Atget's is grounded in such a way that the artist can play at will. He can be funny or mystical. Cute, dramatic, silly, maudlin, scary, mundane. A whole range can be covered. Precisely because the location allows it. If it is Franklin, Massachusetts, upstate New York, Paris or Athens, you have a place to play with, and make some statements about. A real place with all sort of drama, social change, heartbreak and despair. Joy and pleasure. I recall an instance in Chilson where the very old police chief tries to get in his car, as Stan photographs him. He almost falls down trying to get in, and you get this awful feeling that he and his culture are at risk

The great photographer and saver of parts of old buildings, Richard Nickel, said he loved to be in an old building they were tearing down. He worked mostly in Chicago around the sixties. Nickel photographed and immortalized the large buildings of the American architect, Louis Sullivan, through the nineteen sixties into the early seventies. He felt he was in the middle of a living organism in the process of becoming a cadaver. He was at the wake, keening with his art, taking pictures and saving a few pieces of ornament. Chilson is recording his culture, as it was ending. I find this hard to say.

He may not have known it. I do, now as I look at the completed history of the time. Maybe it doesn't matter whether he knew or did not know.

Why does this way of life have to end? Why did Chilson have to die with it? Nobody wants to die. Nobody wants their way of life to die. But it does, and it bothers a great artist like Chilson. Like Burchfield whose old houses will fall down, or Atget, the neighborhood photographer in Paris, who walks amid its urban renewal. Or Nickel who witnesses the desecration of Sullivan's buildings. Chilson shows us Wrentham and Franklin. Both change totally and Chilson dies in a nursing home.

He never says it, but I do. It is built into his movies. That it is too bad to have to leave the old world of self-sustaining villages. The suburban paradise is to come next. This will be our end as a people. We will go into the tv and car and the suburban home-fortress and never come out. We will overmedicate, overfeed, overnurture, overeducate, over-everything, ourselves and kin. Well, that is what happened and I cannot tell whether Stan knew it. To me he says, ain't it a shame to lose all this life?

Ain't that a shame. Indeed it is. Without him the view of the lovely life gone past, would go almost unnoticed. With him, it is passing nearly unnoticed. Who can care about this Massachusetts, a few towns in the thirties and then the forties and then the fifties? Not too many folks. Especially when that life is presented in an odd serial form where one scene follows the other with no apparent order. His movies show a parade, followed by people coming down stairs, then maybe an old gent raising a flag. No order or arrangement, one can make into a story.

Under his apparently innocent portrayals of Franklin and Wrentham is an ethereal, eternal beauty. The mark of zorro, of good art. Universal beauty.

Innocence like his, hints at a less than pleasing future. Chilson's views of small towns in Massachusetts pulsate with the meanings we may attach to them. He loads the pictures with affect, his worry, his less than fully conscious view of social change.

Chilson begs for analysis. His moving pictures, stilled, speak volumes about the thirties and forties. He helps me appreciate what we were to lose. The integrated, whole village. Loss is imminent and he can't stop it. He knows this. It bothers him mightily. He is looking at the town going under and can only record it as it sinks.

The scenes of earthmoving equipment transforming the town with new roads, the town scenes of moving cars. A man walking down the street with an old fence as backdrop. It looks like it is about to fall down. It symbolizes the fragility of the life then; the certainty it will change; the fence will come down and the depression end and people won't walk much anymore, but drive around in the self-contained spaces we call cars.

Stan has the people go straight to center stage and chatter. They talk to us, wave, say hi to Stan, and us. They are grounded. Even when they are just walking past us, they fit in the scene. They belong in Franklin, know where they are going and that a tomorrow like today will await them. Stan is filming. Just Stan with his camera as usual. Whether chatting or going past, the world they grace is charmed.

The picture of any good artist or photographer talks to us. Stan's do. They talk an old language of the village, here, or as it is on some other continent or planet. It is just Stan doing what he does. It is so damn common you miss it. He is marking the thing called "village," with his scent and trademark. Call him quaint. Call him quiet.

Chilson bites off a little piece of reality and gives us the universal village, American style. Very powerful. We all have in us a similar capacity for greatness. To call forth a verisimilitude that will defy time and decay. But few can bring it out. It requires only three things. A vision, first of all, and then only effort and quiet.

Good artists have a signature. You can always spot their work and it makes your little heart jump. Skip a beat. Chilson does that for me. He gives hope.

Chilson fills in the part of our local American history that has to do with when the village was in tact. The experience he records is, to me, a long song.

The village was replaced by the suburb. The main street shifted from the heart of the village to the mall at the edge of town, to the regional mall. Yesterday I visited such a place for the first time in some months. The regional mall may go the way of the village, when we learn what the net means and we satisfy our deepest shopping needs by pressing a few buttons at the home. Maybe the malls will empty soon. A new main street will have to be found. The next revolution in technology is come. This makes Chilson more important as a local teacher. It is a right moment to revitalize the village.

Representational art is barely above a whisper in its message. The politics is muted. Burchfield rued that progress would obliterate the old buildings he painted. He hoped "that the curse of physical improvement would not be visited upon them."

Atget photographed his Paris empty. With few people and old structures looming out of a mist. Shops standing there alone and a bit forlorn. Junk dealers and their rags flapping in metaphysical winds. He sold his photographs, as one would postcards. They were mere documents, but they held a message that Paris would continue to be cleaned up to satisfy the middle classes and the upscale merchants. Department stores were making a big splash. The old Paris would just have to scrub down. The ragpickers living in shacks, this bum-culture, was being driven out of town to the outskirts where the urban swells would not have to look at them.

Our own Evans, Lange and Shahn document the thirties for us with the poor on center stage, backed by some raggedy towns and villages. Basic America. Poignant. All representational art, sort of, but loaded with meaning and bare beauty. Meant to elicit some response from the viewer, who is a witness.

Representational art can teach and make us aware of our responsibility. Certainly, Stan teaches us. Only we may not see it. It is so very mundane and innocent. We do not see what the pictures tell us. His world is quiet. Play the film and let it roll from one scene to the next. No radio or voices in the room. The life of his time enters your head and heart. It is really a very big art.