Upon graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1916, a 23-year-old Charles Ephraim Burchfield returned to his rural hometown of Salem, Ohio. He was deeply inspired by his surroundings there. In fact, from 1915 to 1917 alone, he produced half of his lifet.mes
’s artistic output.
Executed circa 1917, the present work hails from a period of intense artistic exploration and personal reflection. "I have always believed 1917 to be the ‘golden year’ of my career," wrote Burchfield in 1965; "I was back home in the town and countryside where I had grown up, which were now transformed by the magic of an awakened art outlook. Memories of my boyhood crowded in upon me to make that t.mes also a dream world of the imagination.”
Trees turned black, jutting upwards from their own wriggly shadows on the grass.
This moody watercolor depicts a road flanked by spindly black trees. The tree in the foreground is balanced on the left side of the composition by a distant, looming tower (which belongs to the high school from which Burchfield graduated). The setting sun or rising moon, visible through the branches of this tree, is echoed throughout the composition in the glow of street lights (see figures 1 and 2). Burchfield often connected the natural world to modern society in such ways, allowing the two to exist in both harmony and tension.
Right: Fig. 2 Detail of street lamps in the present work
The wind rises, the poplar tree outside my window, a writhing tortured black many fingered mass, with wild lightning curling around it—(trees—crazy black trees shapes, outlines with phosphorescent yellow and emerald, against the wind white)—
To Burchfield, the natural world was a reflection of the human condition—the coexistence of joy and doom; the beauty of life paired with the inevitability of death. The dramatic contrast between light and dark in this composition, at once provincial and fantastical, is quintessential Burchfield. It serves as a dark, metaphysical reflection of his own psyche.