Dandy Lion

Charles Burchfield

No one is like him. He is a bright light, for sure. Says he never saw anything more beautiful than a dandylion. He paints unusual pictures of nature suffused with a mysterious haze. In the middle period of his life he did some buildings which is what I like the best of his large body of work.

My sense for art comes from within, from places deep in memory and experience. I know a big thing about art and that is, that it has to connect someplace in me.

What is true for me is that his buildings, humble structures of the middle period of his work, from the early '20's to the Second World War, completely floor me. Burchfield derogates the work of this period. I just love the buildings and the feelings they emit.

First, these watercolors are of homes. I never felt I had one, growing up in two small rooms in a third floor flat with my mother. It never felt like a family or a home. I envied the people next door, the Connelly's, who had a home. I would stand outside the back door and hear their silverware scrape, when they were having the evening meal. That is what I wanted more than anything in the world, to be in a family. Under a unified roof, a home.

The pictures are about the people in the houses, but you usually can't see them. The thing is, you imagine them, in these shack-like places, cold all around their walls, and their human beings are, inside, doing things families do.

"Six-o-clock," one of his popular paintings, does show them through a window. They are shadows, rather than recognizable forms. What a thing that is! For me, it is a great picture. This painting has a life of its own that lurks a few inches above the picture I am viewing.

A lot of Burchfield's paintings of this period are photographs to me. They look like photos, not paintings. They are to do with views from the street and they focus on buildings of a commercial or residential nature. They have to do with survival; of both the structure, and of the painter.

Burchfield battles depression and sadness in this period of his life. Later he will move to the last years of life with a burst of nature pictures. He doesn't say why he is sad and confused. Maybe he does not know. It may have to do with the fact he does not know where his work is leading him. His notes in the diary indicate that his work, of this period, is a sidetrip; to do buildings, ships and bridges, until he can get his act together again and do nature pictures, the thing he likes to do best.

This foray by Burchfield, the building phase, in the middle period of Burchfield's life, lasts a generation, thank goodness. I like it better than the trips he takes in nature. A generation is a long time. For some reasons the artist needed that long, I guess, to make firm in his mind, his final act, his last phase of creation before death. In it, he did some unusual nature paintings. A blend of this and that, this earth and also the one in his head. I like buildings in my art. Hopper buildings fascinate me. More the homes than anything else, but I do enjoy commercial buildings and street scenes a lot too. In both Hopper and Burchfield. They have a kind of documentary feeling to them. It is as if the two artists are giving me a sociological feel for the period of time they are living through. What they do, what great artists do, is convey both the look and the feel of the time. A great photographer, Atget, does the same for Paris.

I look on the photographs of turn-of-the-century Paris, by Eugene Atget, and they just make me lose myself completely. It has to do with my love of photos and of street scenes, buildings, especially shops with hats, shoes and corsets on display. Atget is a documentary photographer, not an artist, he says. But who is he to say? He is a great artist, by golly, a a very great artist. He puts his whole self in his work. So does Burchfield whose work also has some of that documentary feel to it. Both portray everyday reality with a feeling that just bounces off the page I am looking at. It is as if I am there with them, feeling what they feel. Only it is so understated. Therin lies their contribution. They meet their art quietly , get into it, and produce it, so it lives in our consciousness, as something special.

One should remember our American artists of the thirties, did think of themselves as recording America as a gift for those to follow. Burchfield spoke of this urge to get us to know the way of life of humans, his neighbors, during the time period he was experiencing. The time period he was experimenting in.

Burchfield is so wonderful. I am content with just having him stay with me a while. In my house, so to say. I put him in my coat pocket.

The painter goes on my daily trip into the glorious world I inhabit. I take him to see Danny at the Dover real estate office, then to the post office, where I buy a stamped envelope nearly every day for 38 cents, and then I send it to someone I want to remember that cold and desolate day. Burchfield makes me smile, is all. He sits in me and makes me feel warm all over. He inhabits me. He locates me on a wind-swept street in a hamlet in upstate New York. Mysterious, hopeful, realistic.

This quiet gentleman. Five children; who loves his wife. Never says much. You see him in a photo with other great American painters, and he's way at the back, shrinking out of sight. What a curious and humble fellow. I mean, it is not fake. He really wants to stay out of anyone's sunlight and just be in his. I get lost in the shadows and bits of light he offers in window and street lamp. I see hurried and cold figures bundled against the night and I say they will soon be indoors, inside these hovels, and at least, will be warm for a while and have something to eat. At least they have families to go home to, and that is a lot.

His structures and moving things, boats and steam locomotives, are of a high order. His scenes are careful and loving constructs. One could never ask more of an artist than that he be perfect. Mr. Burchfield is perfect. A ten out of ten.

They leave me breathless. I go back and back to Wellesley Library. Pull the books off the shelf and go through an obsessive ritual, like some kind of nut who compulsively washes his hands several times a day. I start with his tree shot, "Summer Solstice, " for which he is famous. I dally in other nature pictures and then timidly turn to a masterpiece, "At the Edge of Town." Then I look at his pictures of buildings. He will say of his role that the artist has to be his or own audience solely.

That "the world is not, can not be an artist's critic." The word, can, is in italics. In his journal he puts the following words in capital letters for emphasis. He's talking about working, for the sake of it. For its own end and argues, one must work, because one must.... do" THAT AND NOTHING ELSE."

Here is the whole quote. "One must work for the joy of working-THAT AND NOTHING ELSE." He feels the necessity to do art.

There is the daily life of maintaining the family and then there is the work, the art. He executes his work through the worries of money and family and illness; he keeps painting.

He stays in the room of creation until it is time to come home and worry about the kids, his spouse, the neighbors and the supper.

The art is done, alone, of course. Everything good is. All great art, by artists, is done, "for themselves in solitude (spiritual solitude if not physical)." He cites Beethoven and Sibelius as creative persons who influence him. Find the poem by Donald Justice.

"On a Picture by Burchfield".

Writhe no more, little flowers. Art keeps long hours.

Already your agony has outlasted ours.

Burchfield locates his self in the nature he so lovingly pictures. His hero is the flower, the leaf, the shadow, the haze, the cold, the bark. He marries the nature with his picture, joins in a holy matrimony. That is the lesson of the flower. It blooms and then passes to earth, unnoticed by most but participates fully in its miracle, the one of being a flower for but an instant in time. The flower and the nature are role models for him. They may spur him on to new deeds and paintings.

Burchfield for me is a painter of structures. He needs the last phase of his work to complete his personal salvation.