Search results for ""Author Charles Burchfield""

Mystical and everyday reveries from the visionary American modernist In the early years of the 20th century, Charles Burchfield painted mystic and visionary landscapes, and with some of his contemporaries, including Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe and Grant Wood, can be seen to have built the foundations of a particularly North American sensibility that critic Dave Hickey said "continues to evoke an unrepentant, gnostic vision of this vast, rolling, abandoned continent—America without Europe—America without Americans—a massive, alluring kingdom." For nearly his entire life, Burchfield also kept a journal. Over 54 years, he filled nearly 10,000 pages. To call this journal epic would be an understatement. A masterpiece whose bulk has remained unread, it is a handwritten tome that combines elements of the American nature journal with a dash of 19th-century spiritual autobiography. It is a record of a man who spent much of his life looking at and considering the sky. In this comparatively small selection pulled from the original 62 volumes, we find Burchfield writing about sitting in the grass with his wife to nap and watch the sunset. He writes about the elation he feels at seeing the first flowers in the spring. He writes about the rain, wind and sun. There’s the resentment of having a job; the depression that sneaks in as he gets older; sometimes, too, he writes about the state of human progress; and occasionally, thoughts about God. It is the tender record of a life devoted to the essences of earthly beauty. Best known for his romantic, often fantastic depictions of nature, watercolorist Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) developed a unique style of watercolor painting that reflected distinctly American subjects and his profound respect for nature.

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Scouring the fallow landscape around the Llobregat river and the Rubí stream near Barcelona with her 8 x 10 camera, Janelle Lynch (born 1969) searches for evidence and omens of nature’s life cycles. Her photographs of anthropomorphized trees, walls of litter-strewn vegetation, rocks and disintegrating leaves, all taken during a four-year stay in Barcelona between 2007 and 2011, are informed by three figures whose texts are excerpted in this volume: Roland Barthes, particularly his discussion of mourning in Camera Lucida; Charles Burchfield, whose pantheistic painterly animations of landscape have much inspired Lynch; and Wendell Berry, whose essay on approaching nature with respect and humility helped to further hone her process. Barcelona is also conceived as a homage to Lynch’s grandmother, who died in 2008, and to the victims of a devastating flood in the region that occurred in 1962.

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