Poetic Passages: The Art of Charles E. Burchfield offers a rare opportunity to explore the creative process of one of America’s most original artists and premier watercolorists.
Organized by noted Burchfield scholar Nancy S. Weekly for the Munson Museum of Art, the exhibition brings together luminous watercolors by Charles Ephraim Burchfield (1893-1967) drawn from the collections of the Munson, Burchfield Penney Art Center, and Addison Gallery of American Art, including many gifts from collector and patron Edward Wales Root.
Over the course of his career, Burchfield developed a singular artistic language that joined careful observation with emotional experience. Through paintings, journals, sketches, and personal correspondence, Poetic Passages reveals how Burchfield transformed observations of nature into intensely personal visions. A lifelong observer of his surroundings, Burchfield regularly recorded his impressions of changing seasons, weather, birds, and plants, always noting his emotional responses. These details and feelings often found their way into his painted works, which evoke atmosphere, sound, memory, and spirituality. For Burchfield, close observation and artistic invention were inseparable, and his watercolors invite viewers to look beyond objective reality and to experience their surroundings as alive, expressive, and deeply personal. As the artist noted, “An artist must paint not what he sees in nature, but what is there.”
Burchfield’s observations, once they found their way into his watercolors, often continued to evolve. He would return to earlier works years or even decades later, enlarging their compositions by attaching strips of paper which he then painted, expanding and reimagining his imagery. His 1917 Conventions for Abstract Thoughts further expanded his visual vocabulary, introducing symbolic forms through which he could express emotions and sensations that could not be conveyed through direct observation alone. Recurring motifs signifying states such as fear, melancholy, and brooding continued to reveal his surroundings into psychological and emotional landscapes as well as physical ones.
For Burchfield, close observation and artistic invention were inseparable, and his watercolors invite viewers to look beyond objective reality and to experience their surroundings as alive, expressive, and deeply personal.
This exhibition was organized by the Munson Museum of Art, Utica, New York, and the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, New York.