Charles Burchfield's Visions in Nature

Charles Burchfield, Crows in March, 1953. Lithograph,
13.25 x 9.75." Courtesy of the Keny Galleries.

The robins in my back yard this month have looked as big as rabbits, so puffed up are their feathers against the entrenched cold. I'm wearing hats in the house like a faint-hearted Cossack. I am writing on the first day of spring, but the drabness of the landscape and depressed temperatures make it hard to feel any warm, seasonal flush of hope.

It's likely that the Keny Galleries in Columbus didn't plan Charles Burchfield: An American Visionary (1893-1967) to assuage the gloom of we, the seasonally saddened, but I find the show an effective antidote to what appears out my window. Burchfield was an observer and recorder of nature extraordinaire. Throughout a long career he not only painted and drew what he saw in the meadows, yards, and woodlots of Ohio and upstate New York, but he recorded his visions of nature at the same time. The trees he paints are the trees you and I see, but with their secret spirits released. In his work, trees and flowers are no longer shy about exposing the thoughts, attitudes, and voices that most of us couldn't know until his patient insight captured them accurately.

The lithograph of Crows in March so captures what Robert Frost called the "inner and outer weather" of this disconcerting, late-blooming season. One identifiable crow flies across the center of the picture, signaling to us that the undulating shapes in the sky above it are crows also. The latter birds are so abstract in shape though, that they seem to give down-facing wings—of birds or bats?—to the dead tree trunks in the swamp, and upward rising ones to the high branches of the living pines. The clouds themselves, and the light that falls between them onto the earth share the wave motion and the undulating pattern of light and dark. Which way is the season going? Will the light ever supplant the dark in this evenly balanced pattern? Will up prevail against down?

Summer Benediction, detail.

In Summer Benediction from the same year, Burchfield's "crow shapes" appear again as part of his visual vocabulary of lull. All the waves end with downward turns, as if they hang peacefully, their motion suspended. Combined with the tiny dots at the horizon line, the weight of the oak leaves and the clouds make one almost hear the drone of insects in a medium of steady heat. 

Charles Burchfield, Summer Benediction, 1953. 12 x 9."
Lithograph. Courtesy of the Keny Gallery.

The flowers in the foreground and mid-ground, however, virtually twinkle, as if their centers were eyes. Though some tall leaves turn down, its from the height of erect, strong stems. The center of the space is framed then but by elements that lead the eye down from the top and up from beneath, to a lovely, open and dreamy space; to a distant hill of possibilities. Compare this to March in the swamp, where the middle is filled with trunks fallen at angles, blocking the way to the tiny spot of light far distant. March seems inescapable; summer is dreams of infinity, with flowers strewn in the path taking you there.

Burchfield's drawings and prints are fewer and less well-known than his watercolors, many painted on a scale allowing for great detail and complex composition. His 1948 Early Spring is such a work, apparently one of many scenes that the artist painted on his own property; he was a connoisseur and expert of the familiar; an intimate of everyday landscape. 


Here the artist is working in a different mode, primarily observational. The sense of a raw, rainy early spring day—is it raining or snowing or both?—makes me shiver. Will the daffodils stand up again tomorrow, or lie in puddles in the mud? The many values of grey in the sky and in the landscape are so well presented: He reminds us that the transitional spring world really is grey. What color there is comes as relief to the reality of winter's habitual, steely neutrality, as if color were indeed merely painted on.

Charles Burchfield, Early Spring—May, 1948. 29 x 40." Watercolor with gouache and charcoal on paper.
Courtesy of the Keny Gallery.

Still, even though this scene is less overtly abstract and formal than the lithographs above, Burchfield still organizes the view with a rhythm and energy native to his eye. The scalloping rows of dark and light clouds is emphasized by the charcoal line drawn over it. These shapes are echoed by the arches of the fence, repeated on a larger scale by the trellised forsythias, the graceful branches of the blossoming trees, and the wind-swept twigs of green leaves. The black fence posts, the tree trunks, the four-square tower of the church all anchor both the world against the blustery weather. We are protected on the other side of a window that affords us this view made a little indistinct, perhaps by the moisture.

Charles Burchfield, Evening Sunlight, Winter, 1917.
Watercolor on paper. 19.5 c 13.5."
Courtesy of the Keny Galleries.

Another watercolor in which Burchfield provides this pleasure of something carefully observed yet aesthetically well-managed is Evening Sunlight, Winter from the days of his early successes in the  'teens. The composition is unusual for him—the single major event, the tree, standing squarely in the middle of the frame—but what surrounds it seems more familiar. The branches in the picture's upper half form their own abstract composition of curved lines and the spaces, cutting across the neutral background colors. The branches trace courses we've seen in the later works, above—the crow wings/bat wings, scallops that can face up or down. The tree and its neighbors shoot expressive lines across each other in a complex network in which the red chimneys hand like exotic fruit. The small town neighborhood as swamp or jungle.

Evening Sunlight, Winter. Detail.

Evening Sunlight, Winter. Detail 2.

The lower part of Evening Sunlight too, while representing shadows in snow, is nevertheless painted in a manner that reminds me of the way he handles distance in the two lithographs above. The washy blue and brown here do the job of grey and white there, and are deployed in the same way as lines of gently sloping, receding  distance. The bands are straighter here, but there are still up-sweeps, the line of waves, and the eventual breakthrough to white, here complicated with with pale sepia dots. The snow doesn't just lie there: For all the stillness of the overall scene, every element within is charged with potential drama and motion.

What Nature is; how and why humans interpret Nature are questions every landscape or plein air artist has to contend with. Each inevitably will put his or her own stamp on Nature in recording it. 

Artists can't represent nature as, "Just the facts, m'am," because it cannot be represented in its plenitude without editing. Nature has no focal point. Art does. It's all about edited compositions made and manipulated around focal points. When nature frightens us, it's because we can't focus or arrange it; our instinct is to manipulate it whenever we can; to find or impose pattern and design from the outset. 

Charles Burchfield, September Afterglow, 1949. Watercolor. 37.25 x 11.125."
The Canton Museum of Art, Gift of Ralph L. Wilson. Courtesy of the Keny Galleries.

Every individual is instinctively aware that humans are tiny compared to nature. We create ways to feel less vulnerable to the mighty accidents of geology, weather, or any of the other great non-rational forces by treating nature with romantic awe, by tackling it to show our notional strength, our by declaring ourselves Nature's friend.

So nature or landscape artists have to bring a taming point of view to their work. Frequently this was a romantic one in American art of the 19th and early twentieth centuries.  Nature is good; it reflects simplicity, innocence, morality—fair weather. Storms suggest judgments.

Burchfield, however, likes the grey areas. He is as interested in the transitional seasons as he is in seasonal peaks. He likes to study light dispersed across landscape in different tempers of weather more than he wants to give us an a straight-up view of a sunny or snowy day. Most important of all, I think, is that he doesn't really project a generalized vision of Nature at all. He represents his own, uniquely personal relationship to it. His pictures show how nature affects him, rather than offering an appeasing point of view.

In September Afterglow, for instance, the sunflower drops its petals. From the limpness of the flower's leaves, we guess that the first frost may have already visited. Is the meadow already frosted over, silver-grey? Or is the color what comes with descending light? Like Early Spring—May, above, the painting is essentially cool blue-grey, with highlights of yellow, green, and coral. Still, there's enough information to make us believe in the details: It's the end of a season, what has bloomed is dying back; both time of day and of year are bleeding the color away; forms dangle and droop.

The limp black forms contrast, though, with the high arch of the flower's stem and the glow over the dwellings. There's a spiritual feeling that makes the yellow petals feel like the sprinkling of holy water. It even makes me feel that the scene could be used as a Christmas card, with that single star twinkling in the sky.

Charles Burchfield, Sultry Moon, weed detail. 1959. 

My sense in this, as in much of Burchfield's work, is not that he has imbued Nature with a romantic vision or any attitude at all, but rather that Burchfield has recorded the effect that Nature has had on him and his vision. What he has put on the paper is indeed reality as he perceives and knows it, not simply as he wishes to conceive of it. This is close to ecstatic vision—witness its luminosity, the softness of the lines, the slight blurring, the repetition of shape, the combination of menace (the forms in the upper right, the strength of black forms) and magic (the unspecified lightness in the field; the sunset color). It is a picture of a scene known not merely to the eyes, but throughout the sensorium.

In Burchfield's 1959 watercolor, Sultry Moon, foreground weeds and a middle-ground tree shimmer under an orange moon in a grey-blue sky. I have only two details here, but each reflects further developments in the artist's way of recording nature's effect on him rather than presenting the outer world through a taming point of view. 

The close up of a weed in full-bloom is virtually figurative, and being such, would seem to wear sacred or regal head gear and drapery. It is very fancy, and its leaves lift from its sides gesturally. Burchfield has repeated most of his black lines with grey ones, giving the effect not so much of shadows but that the figure is trembling. Between the costuming and the implied motion, this denizen of the weed-lot has become something significant, alive, and magically communicating with us.

Charles Burchfield, Sultry Moon, tree detail, 1959.
Series of window reflections across center.

The tree that catches the moon glow is similarly both radiant and quivering, as if the physical energy of light were transferred to kinetic form once the branches received it. Broken and stuttering lines create the branches and foliage that shudder, as it seems, in response to the moon's quiet energy. 

Once more, the painting's palette is basically neutral—grey and brown—with the heat of the orange sun making itself felt by simple contrast. The orange along the top of the tree reads as flame, especially with the kind of mark Burchfield has chosen. As with the weed, the shadowy reduplication of mark, and the disconnected leaves/bark falling away at the bottom lend the sense of subtle but powerful movement, reinforced by the fact that the moon is not emanating rays aimed at the Earth. It's power slides off obliquely, in concentric arcs that are mirrored by the staccato thread of orange and green along the horizon line. 

In the sultry night there is inner tension, vibration, passion. The artist did not put it there. Nature it to him. The painting shows what Burchfield saw and what he wants to reveal. He sees nature and he speaks in voices, responding beyond the usual capacity of paint. Nature isn't something to see, but to experience to the very depths of mind and body, and to record in as many dimensions as possible.

Were I to have Burchfield's painting of the scene out my window—the back yard with its straw-blonde grass and shivering robins—I would see those patches of green I overlook everyday, and and the maroon among the leaves of the vine that struggles to regenerate. I would understand that the position of the grass's translucent blades has meaning; that they bend not because they are frozen, but in their will to move. Burchfield's painting would be instantly recognizable as my yard. Yet I'd know him as the medium by which my plot's  nature can be known, and as the sage who can teach me how to listen to the tree's bark as well as the dog's; to feel not only the heat of the flame, but creeping spring's as well.

From Tapestry Room into the Garden: New Oil Paintings by Elsie Sanchez

Elsie Sanchez, BREATHE, oil on canvas, 2011. 56 x 68." Courtesy of the artist.

The Keny Galleries in Columbus are showing Elsie Sanchez's work of the past two years. The show runs through December 7. 

Sanchez's medium is oil paint. Her canvases have a teeming, gnarly fluency; they feel as though the paint climbed and gathered itself onto the surfaces. Her paintings seem like acts of will and idea; of partnership with paint, rather than use of it. 

Any single piece in this highly sensual body of work exerts a powerful attraction. Sanchez does not stint on color nor does she dilute it. Since she works in small strokes and patches, her canvases define "teeming." BREATHE, from 2011, is what she would call a "tapestry," fascinated as she is with the process of weaving. It's an excellent metaphor for what she has made, a surface of great depth and texture, the warmth of which enfolds the viewer at first glance. It radiates into the room; it vibrates, pulsates. Yet it is stable; it is uniform, and its forms are clearly differentiated. From a distance, its "blue heart" is evident.

BREATHE detail. Author photo.

BREATHE is over 4-1/2 by 5-1/2 feet in size. Sanchez painted it—as she does everything—without more than a few marks—without prior drawing or guidelines—on the canvas. The even flow of the color units and outlinings are the result of her slow, contemplative process, which equally values each individual daub of paint. Close inspection of her canvases makes this radiantly clear, for every form has a unique and personal air; each stands out never as a rushed repetition, but as a deliberate and considered statement. If we, as viewers, put any amount of time at all into standing before this painting, we will find it difficult not to compare the inherent will and movement of our bodies with the highly colored regularity of the canvas; to feel a sense of the brilliant variety and depth available within the concept of patient regularity.

Elsie Sanchez, Sanctuary II, 2012. Oil on canvas, 20 x 18."
Courtesy of the artist.

Sanchez has been moving in a new direction, from the weaving model into work that both organically and logically extends it. Her work of 2012 continues the pods of color, but in a mixture of different sizes, shapes, and relationships; in new palettes; and, as a result, with new illusion of depth back and forth through the painting's surface. Had Van Gogh painted abstractly, would it have looked like this? It's a moot question, but Sanchez's forms and colors in Sanctuary II may remind viewers of the Dutch painter. There may even be an impulse to describe the writhing shapes as "tormented" or "tortured." 

I think this painting approaches the pictorial, though, in having sections that are defined by different colors (ochres and pinks of the top compared to lower greens and blues), shapes (the flames of yellow leaping up) and even the suggestion of foreground, as in the peaks that arise from the bottom edge of the canvas. Sanchez's color choices have eased into the pastel region from the highly saturated primary and secondary colors, making for a vernal palette. Rather than torment, I tend to feel in the image the dense violence of spring's growth, the riot of nature's forms and colors shoving and unfolding themselves into the light.

Elsie Sanchez, Response, 2012. Oil on canvas. 32 x 26." Courtesy of the artist.

Response detail. Author photo.

The two most recent paintings in the Keny show move even farther into suggestions of the botanical, or into that sensuous area where floral and sexual intertwine. In Glimpse and Response, a palette considerably reduced and refined to golden yellow and crimson is opulent, tactile, suggestive. The eyes travel the curves of these surfaces like a lover's over a concubine's; the hands wish to do the same, so thickly applied and rich is the paint. If the canvas reminds us a little of Klimt's golden opulence of lovers, this is, by contrast, all expression. No figures are present or required to convey the freedom, the intensity, or the artful control of the feeling of the botanical and sexual this painting conveys. 

I find Response a thrilling work. I love it for what Sanchez does extraordinarily well: She conveys the pinnacle of emotion and sensation; the sense of smoldering passion both fresh and studied— sustained just short of the consuming flame.

Elsie Sanchez, Glimpse, 2012. Oil on canvas. 32 x 28."
Courtesy of the artist.

Elijah Pierce, Sanctuary in the 1960s

Columbus, Ohio lays claim to its share of famous artists: George Bellows was born and raised here, as was James Thurber. Roy Lichtenstein studied and taught at Ohio State during the '40s. Currently living and working among us are the pioneer of computer art, Charles Csuri; photographer Tony Mendoza; Ann Hamilton, and Aminah Robinson. 

Elijah Pierce, 1892-1984 Christ with Rose of Sharon, 1965 Painted bas relief woodcarving,17 1/2 x 17 inches Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

Robinson is a direct heir—personal and artistic—of the artist I believe closest to our city's civic identity, woodcarver Elijah Pierce. Pierce, a barber by trade, came to Columbus in 1916 when he was 24. He died here in 1984, at age 92. The son of a former slave, he grew up in rural Mississippi where he studied through the eighth grade and learned to carve with a pocketknife.

In Columbus, Pierce was famous not only as a carver, but also as the spiritual center of a community. He was the man without whom a large and prolific generation of the city's Black artists might have missed their calling. Art, religious devotion, and rock-solid principles for righteous living were strongly allied in him, as both his oeuvre and the living memory of him attest.

During his lifetime, Pierce became famous beyond Columbus. In 1973, he won first prize in the  International Exhibition of Primitive Art in Yugoslavia. In 1975, he was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, as a master traditional artist.

Among the many to whom Pierce was a mentor and inspiration is Kojo Kamau, Columbus's eminent photographer. Some of Kamau's photos of Pierce and his shop can be found online here. Although the photos show what we know to be an urban workshop in the late 20th century, Pierce himself looks like a man from an earlier place and era. His famously stick-like figure—his expression adding to the sense of a cigar-store Indian in the view of him at his table, formally dressed in his unimproved setting—certainly reinforces the stories about the man himself: unpretentious, plain, a believer with his eyes on the right course. Nothing about him suggests that he felt any need to appear sophisticated or urbane.

Amish, Holmes Co., Ohio Variable Star Crib Quilt, c. 1890's Pieced cotton chambray, 41 x 33 1/2 inches Private collection Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

The Keny Galleries in Columbus are currently showing Two Visions of Spirituality: Elijah Pierce's Woodcarvings and Historical Amish Quilts, a beautiful show. Pierce's carvings make a natural visual pairing with the quilts. Together they evoke the warmth of personal, direct expression from a rural past. Ohio is home to substantial and still growing Amish communities that preserve traditional ways, down to continuing use of horse and buggy transportation and eschewal of electrification. Even though the patterns and sewing methods of the quilts displayed can be found today, the antique quilts in this show  (ranging from the 1890s through 1937) do indeed have the softness that age imparts textiles. Time has enriched their inherent beauty.

Amish, Holmes Co., Ohio Probably made by Naomi Hershberger (wife of Daniel, married 1907) Nine Patch/Diamond in the Square Variation Quilt, c. 1915-25 Pieced cotton and cotton sateen, 78 x 76 inches Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

It finally struck me, though, as I surveyed Pierce's boldly colored, folkloric carvings of Jesus, angels, and biblical stories, that most of his work in this show—hanging so comfortably among the antique quilts—actually dates from the 1960s and '70s. His carvings, so simple in appearance and convinced in moral vision, are the work of an urban Black man—one who remained a starched community elder, sitting downtown in his rocker, plying folk art during the civil rights era of fiery social and racial unrest.

Burning buildings during Watts riots, August 1965. New York World-Telegram photo.

In 1965, when many of the pieces at Keny are dated, I was a high school student in small-town Ohio, unable to escape the network news my parents watched every evening. In memory, it's all scenes of shattered windows and fires at night in cities wracked by race riots. The people of my homogenous town had strongly worded and freely expressed opinions about Negroes in general. My skin was always crawling with generalized foreboding. Heroes and hopes were assassinated as if we were supposed to get used to it. The world felt to me wholly public and political, a world of causes, not individuals. For an introspective, cloistered girl it was an appalling time. While I was engaged by the cause of civil rights, I was overpowered by the intensity of the public world. I lacked knowing that it could be legitimate to insist on growing up as a clear-headed individual with some solid ideas about her place in the world.

My memories of the intense anxiety of the '60s make the Keny selection of Pierce's work feel almost shockingly immediate and new. These carvings, so focused on the spiritual life, picture havens of the personal in a world that we know was overtaken by virtual public warfare and urgent social movements. Art has to come from a strong, concentrated self—even art that responds directly to the affairs of the world or proposes changes in them. 

Elijah Pierce, 1892-1984 Angel (with Ruby Brown's Family), 1966 Painted bas relief woodcarving, 27 3/4 x 17 inches Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

Pierce was hardly oblivious to society: His work covered civil rights themes and heroes. The work in the Keny show is only a tiny selection of his spiritual oeuvre. But even here we see in one of his many portrayals of angels, an Angel (with Ruby Brown's Family) from 1966, his concern with issues of race. Ruby Brown is the title subject of a poem by Langston Hughes:

She was young and beautiful
And golden like the sunshine
That warmed her body.
And because she was colored
Mayville had no place to offer her,
Nor fuel for the clean flame of joy
That tried to burn within her soul.

In Hughes' poem, Ruby, the scullery maid, is corrupted into prostitution by men who take advantage of her entirely normal wishes for a life with a little money and incident. "The good church folk do not mention/ Her name any more." But Pierce depicts an angel before a cross with the sacred heart, and a rose of Sharon, protecting Ruby's family from any taunts by churchgoing neighbors. Not only are they protected, they are totally removed from others.

Elijah Pierce, 1892-1984 Angel with Mother and Child in the Garden, 1966 Painted bas relief woodcarving, 25 3/4 x 15 1/2 inches Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

In Angel with Mother and Child, too, a mother and her son appear to stand in a garden with an angel watching over them. Part of their blessed status seems to be their self-contained separation from anyone else.

Elijah Pierce, 1892-1984 The Good Samaritan, 1965 Painted bas relief woodcarving, 13 x 22 inches Private collection Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

Even in The Good Samaritan, the most complex and detailed composition here, the special, protective relationship is celebrated. The priest and the Levite—dominant in their size, posture, and colors—pass the robbers' victim, but the Samaritan—small and brown—bows over to assist him. Their relationship appears, like the angelic ones we've seen, to be placed in a garden, away from the open space the others traverse.

Elijah Pierce, 1892-1984 Sermon on the Mount, 1965 Painted bas relief woodcarving, 15 3/4 x 15 inches Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

The most interesting removal of all, I think, is the portrayal of Jesus in Sermon on the Mount. He sits with his hands folded on his knees, alone on a hill under a sky with three-dimensional clouds. The yellow orb has beams that signify sun, although the darkness of the upper sky gives the feeling of night rolling in, with either the sun setting or the moon rising.

For a depiction of the Sermon on the Mount this is unusual, for there is no congregation even suggested, only Jesus with his upward-looking, far-away gaze. He's not preaching: He's thinking, or introspecting. Under a dramatic sky, with flowers growing at his feet, Jesus looks so contented! This is a moment of quiet happiness that the human writing this entirely relates to. It's a contentment that seems achievable, even without a halo.

While my observations about the carvings in Keny's beautiful show may add nothing to the knowledge of Pierce's work, my point in writing is about my own satisfaction to discover in this folk artist a fellow traveler through an era so disconcerting and painful to me, one in which I felt so keen a need for a quiet shelter. I wish I had discovered him then. 

I've never had religious convictions; Jesus is a metaphor for me. But the habit of cultivating strength from the inside out, through wise solitude, is one I've learned to value highly. It's a form of spirituality characteristic not only of religion, but of artistic visions as well. While the 1960s flamed, Pierce maintained his religious faith and expressed it through art-making too. Whatever his legacy in the church, his legacy among practicing artists is deep. To inspire seekers of freedom for the inner life amidst a clamorous world of mass concerns strikes me as a great legacy.