CHARLES BURCHFIELD, Dawn in Hemlock Woods

Buffalo, New York, Upton Hall Gallery, State University College at Buffalo, Charles Burchfield, Recent Paintings, 1963
Buffalo, New York, Albright-Knox Gallery, Charles Burchfield, Early Watercolors, April-May 1963
Kansas City, Missouri, Charlotte Crosby Kemper Gallery, Inaugural Exhibition, September-October 1963
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie Institute of Art, 1964 International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, October 1964-January 1965, illustrated
Washington, D.C., The White House, West Wing, 1964
Washington, D.C., National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, American Landscape: A Changing Frontier, April-June 1966
New York, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Charles Burchfield Memorial Exhibition, Paintings and Drawings, 1968, no. 21
Chicago, Illinois, Terra Museum of American Art, Five American Masters of Watercolor, May-July 1981
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Milwaukee Museum of Art; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Oklahoma Art Center, Charles Burchfield, January-November 1984

In his journal entries from his youth in Ohio, Charles Burchfield recorded the sense of wonder he experienced upon the rebirth of nature each spring.  He was particularly fascinated by the spontaneous fires that erupted in the sulfurous swampland east of Little Beaver Creek in Salem.  Nature’s ability to revitalize itself through spontaneous or accidental fires inspired paintings such as Dawn in Hemlock Woods. These fires seemed to Burchfield a primeval event symbolizing spring’s annual resurgence over winter.  He wrote in his journal on March 12, 1922, “The roar of the rapids--it holds me spellbound--thought ceases & yet is scattered to the far horizons where the white flames of March fires are burning--/The white flames of March fire[s] flicker like lightening over the black wastes of winter--/The side of the hillside is warm like a grate fire” (J. Benjamin Townsend, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, 1993, p. 357).  According to J. Benjamin Townsend, “Nature offered Burchfield an inexhaustible source of analogy, metaphor, and symbol.  Thus it served as an unselfconscious poet and moral teacher, a sorcerer ever ready to induct the willing apprentice” (Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, p. 357).

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, Charles Burchfield’s health had begun to decline.  Debilitating asthma attacks forced him to spend less time outdoors and more time working in the studio and he began working more from his memory, imagination, and the extensive notes he made in his journals, and less from nature.  Burchfield’s journals--over 10,000 pages worth of entries by the end of his life-- served as a repository of inspiration on the days when he could not visit his beloved “Big Woods.”  It was during this period of ill health and confinement that the artist’s work quietly underwent its final transformation.  John I.H. Baur writes, “It was then that he moved decisively away from realism toward a more abstract treatment of nature, emphasizing mood and the expressive power of simplified forms and masses” (Charles E. Burchfield: The Late Years and Selected Earlier Works, New York, 1979, n. p.).  Inspired by his old journal entries from the 1910s and ‘20s, he began expanding and reworking some of his earlier watercolors still in his studio, transforming them into some of his most abstract and expressionist works. 

Begun in 1946 and completed in 1961, Dawn in Hemlock Woods exemplifies Burchfield’s expressionist depiction of nature, full of energy, assurance and inventiveness.  Townsend writes, “What distinguishes the watercolors of Burchfield’s final, transcendental phase from his earlier painting is their portrayal of nature, not simply as a reflection of the artist’s own experience and subjective response through the anthropomorphizing of natural events, but as an autonomous, animistic cosmos in which objects and forces present their own poetic dramas” (Townsend, p. 528).