Charles Burchfield
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"Watercolorist Charles Ephraim Burchfield (1893-1967) is one of America's most original artists. Best known for his romantic, often fantastic depictions of nature, Burchfield developed a unique style of watercolor painting that reflected distinctly American subjects and his profound respect for nature." Burchfield-Penny Website.
For more information please visit: The Burchfield-Penney Art Center
or read "Charles Burchfield's Journals: The Poetry of Place"
CHARLES BURCHFIELD (1893 ~ 1967)
Charles Ephraim Burchfield, one of America’s most original and expressive watercolorists, had a fascination with the Zoar Valley area, painting over 30 works depicting places from Gowanda to Springville. When you look this body of work, you immediately know that to Burchfield, Zoar was all about the forest, “The Big Woods,” as he called it, and that it was a forest most sacred and beautiful to him.
Charles Burchfield first came to Gowanda in 1923, the year after he moved to Buffalo, and began painting the Gowanda Canyons (what we now call Zoar Valley) and Martin’s Point (the striking outcrop at the confluence of the Main and South Branch Cattaraugus Creeks). He referred to these untamed gorges as Martin’s Point Country. While we call this area Zoar Valley now, in Burchfield’s day Zoar Valley was the valley proper, with its floodplains, meadows and wildflowers, beaver and butterfly, rimmed by forests and flanked by the canyon gorges. It was once part of a connected forest from Springville to The Big Woods to Gowanda Glen to Perrysburg to Forestville to Lake Erie. The forest connected everything. And Burchfield worshiped in this forest. He loved it.
Burchfield’s early work in Zoar includes three paintings of the Gowanda Canyons done in the realistic style of his Middle Period (1921-1943). But the majority of Burchfield’s work in Zoar, done primarily during and in the expressive style of his Late Period (1943 – 1966), is of the forest, the woods that delighted and refreshed him. Spirit of the North Woods, Autumn Leaves at Play, Clatter of Crows in Spring Woods, Light Coming Into a Woods, Arctic Owl and Winter Moon, Hemlock in November, Fires of Spring in the Big Woods, The Tree that Reached the Sky, Eye of God in the Woods ~ these titles reveal how Burchfield expressed Zoar, with images of the forest and sky so beautiful you want to cry. He delved into all his favorite imagery – trees, birds, insects, sky, stars, change of weather and the change of seasons. While the striking canyon walls of Martin’s Point remain with us long after we leave their comfort, the natural wonder of Zoar stretches far and wide, deep into the spirit of the forest, to Burchfield’s Big Woods.
Julie Broyles, Director
Zoar Valley Nature Society