 | | |
| Charles Burchfield's Seasons (Essential Paintings Series) | 
 enlarge | Authors: Guy Davenport, Charles Ephraim Burchfield
Publisher: Pomegranate Communications
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $19.96
You Save: $4.99 (20%)
Buy New/Used from $12.50
Avg. Customer Rating:  (2 reviews)
Sales Rank: 739533
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 88
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 10.8 x 9.8 x 0.5
ISBN: 1566409799
Dewey Decimal Number: 759.13
EAN: 9781566409797
ASIN: 1566409799
Publication Date: August 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
One of the country?s finest watercolorists of the twentieth century, Charles Burchfield produced a variety of effects unprecedented in scale and technique for the medium. Adhering to the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition of revealing nature?s primordial energy through the drama of human emotions, Burchfield made the commonplace extraordinary, the everyday miraculous. Charles Burchfield?s Seasons offers a wealth of visionary art rendered in his personal abstract stylistic shorthand that vividly expresses the moods and sounds of light and wind. Accompanied by quotations from Charles Burchfield?s Journals, the color plates in this book resonate with the artist?s vibrancy.
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Charles Burchfield's Seasons September 15, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Contains graphics mostly of his later period, and very few are in colourmost are grainy black and white. The quality of print production is rather poor, and you find yourself squinting at most of the prints, to make any sense of what it is you are seeing, not so much because of the style of the art, more it's production in this book. Gave only a very short history of the artist, and did not discuss much in the way of his inspirations or change of style over the years.
 "I often wonder what I am, naturalist or artist..." January 4, 2007
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
It is remarkable what Charles Burchfield could do with what might be considered ordinary subjects taken from a Midwestern field or December sky. I think he will ultimately be remembered for the nature paintings that he deeply imbued with his personal symbolism of both vision and sound. Check out his "Summer Solstice" (1961 - 1966) on the cover of this book, or Plate 28, "Gateway to September" (1946 - 1956) if you'd like to see how he incorporated sound and movement into his paintings. He used `agitrons' (cartoon-strip squiggles) to indicate movement, `squeans' (asterisks with empty centers) for shafts of sunlight, and `blurgits' (Burchfield describes them as `shrill high pinpoints') for the sounds of crickets. The overall effect is Expressionist rather than cartoonish. Burchfield was a completely original watercolorist.
This book of Burchfield's paintings highlights his fascination with the changing seasons. It is not meant to be a complete biography, nor does it contain the complete works of this artist. Almost every full-page, full-color plate is accompanied by a quotation from Burchfield. Next to Plate 12, "June Wind" (1937) he says, "If all musical sounds were to be forever silenced--orchestras, bands, human voices, birds & insects--and I were allowed to retain one sound to cheer me, I would ask that the wind might play in the tree-tops. The wind! Motion is life. All is dead that stands still."
This book has a ten page introduction to Charles Burchfield's life and work, but most of `Seasons' consists of 36 carefully selected watercolors that highlight his intimate relationship with nature. I often wonder whether this artist was a synesthete--one of those rare human beings who can `see' sounds and `hear' colors.
If you'd like to read a more complete biography of Charles Burchfield, try "The Inlander" by John Baur (lots of illustrations but few are in color) or "The Paintings of Charles Burchfield: North by Midwest" by Nannette Maciejunes and Michael Hall (much more color).
|
|
|
| | |
