Tracing an artist’s life through journals in the West Seneca Bee

Charles Ephraim Burchfield, the American watercolorist, is best known for his romantic, often fantastic depictions of nature. According to the Burchfield Penney Art Center website, he developed a style of watercolor painting that reflected distinctly American subjects and his profound respect for nature.

Burchfield’s artistic achievement was honored 50 years ago with the creation of the Charles Burchfield Center at Buffalo State College on Dec. 9, 1966, a month before his death on Jan. 11, 1967.

A portion of the artist’s life was spent in the Gardenville area of West Seneca, fostering a love and fascination with nature.

For the last five years, former Gardenville resident Nancy Tomchuck Barlow has been tracing Burchfield’s life in the hamlet and connecting it to his work in a book she hopes to publish in the near future.

his is a self-portrait of Charles Burchfield created in January 1916. He used watercolor and Conte crayons on paper.“He wrote a journal from the time he was in high school until almost the day he died,” she said. “If he put it in his journal, I then went and talked to that person, or I have a story about what he wrote.”

Burchfield moved to Gardenville in April 1925.

Tomchuck Barlow knew Burchfield when she was a young girl living inGardenville, but she said she did not come to know him as an artist until later in life.

“There was a notice in the paper that they were looking to train docents for the Burchfield Penney Art Center,” she said.

 After an interview, Tomchuck Barlow became part of a docent class offering tours at the museum. During that time, she said, people would frequently ask about Gardenville.

“I came home and started to put together ways of being able to tell people where Gardenville is,” she said.

This launched Tomchuck Barlow into a five-year effort to collect stories from across Gardenville and the area that Burchfield found to be inspirational.

One of the entries in Burchfield’s journal that Tomchuck Barlow focused on was about presenting an art project to a sixth-grade class at Gardenville Elementary in 1961.

“In his journal he wrote that that was the highlight of his career,” she said. “So I set out to find a couple of the students who were part of that class.”

She was able to locate two students, and their accounts of that day are written in her book to supplement Burchfield’s journal entry of the event.

“[The Burchfield Penney collections] don’t have much information on the years that he lived here inGardenville,” Tom- chuck Barlow said.

In 1921, Burchfield moved to Buffalo to work as a designer for the prominent wallpaper company M.H. Birge & Sons, according to the museum’s collection.

Fascinated by Buffalo’s streets, harbor, railroad yards and surrounding countryside, he adopted a more realistic artistic style. Burchfield’s foray into realism lasted for several years, as stated on the website.

Small towns also were paramount to Burchfield’s painting and the creation of his style, according to Tomchuck Barlow.

Burchfield was born April 9, 1893, in Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio. Five years later, his family moved to Salem, Ohio, where he graduated from high school as class valedictorian in 1911. He attended the Cleveland School of Art from 1912 to 1916.

“There was a book called ‘Winesburg, Ohio,’ which is a book that was written around the turn of the century by Sherwood Anderson, and he wrote stories about people in a small town. Burchfield loved that book,” she said.

Salem was an important town for Burchfield and his work, Tomchuck Barlow said.

“When he moved to Gardenville, he didn’t like it very much,” she added.

Burchfield yearned for Salem and found that the hamlet he was now residing in lacked a town center, municipal building and public library. However, Gardenville had offerings that Burchfield found to be important.

He began painting what he found within a few feet and a few miles from his home, according to Tomchuck Barlow.

“He painted what he saw, but it was also what we saw,” she said.

“We knew him as the man who lived down the street who happened to earn his living as an artist,” she said.

Burchfield’s work was not well known in the area, unlike that of artists Frank Lloyd Wright and Tony Sisti, who headlined that era of art culture. Tomchuck Barlow said Burchfield was a “normal” man who blended into everyday life.

“He had five children. He was a husband and a father. What he did for a living was that he painted,” she said.

The world of painting was far beyond the scope of what could be found in Gardenville, according to Tomchuck Barlow. In this world, Burchfield was a celebrity, a leading American artist, whose company was sought by many.

According to the Burchfield Penney, he became friends with Edward Hopper in 1928, after Hopper’s essay on Burchfield appeared in the July issue of Arts magazine. Hopper wrote, “The work of Charles Burchfield is most decidedly founded, not on art, but on life, and the life that he knows and loves best.”

In 1929, the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries in New York City began representing Burchfield, allowing the artist to resign from his job as a designer to paint full time. During this period, his works show optimism and an appreciation of American life, according to the Burchfield Penney.

In 1930, his work was the subject of the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s first one-person exhibition, “Charles Burchfield: Early Watercolors 1916 to 1918.” He was included in the Carnegie Institute’s “The 1935 International Exhibition of Paintings,” in which his painting “The Shed in the Swamp” was awarded second prize. In December 1936, Life magazine declared him one of America’s 10 greatest painters in its article “Burchfield’s America.”

In the 1940s, Burchfield returned to ideas begun in early fantasy scenes that he often expanded into transcendental landscapes.

The 29-acre Charles E. Burchfield Nature & Art Center was established in 2000 in honor of the late artist’s love for the natural world. The center, located at 2001 Union Road in West Seneca, overlooks the artist’s former home and studio.

Burchfield once said, “An artist must paint not what he sees in nature, but what is there. To do so he must invent symbols, which, if properly used, make his work seem even more real than what is in front of him.”

He followed this artistic vision until the end of his life, creating some of his most mystical works.

When first looking at Burchfield’s work, Tomchuck Barlow said, it’s easy to accept it without much thought.

“It doesn’t slash at you at first; it’s quiet. I have a couple [pieces] that I’m very fond of,” she said.

Today, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, located at 1300 Elmwood Ave. in Buffalo, stands as a testament to the art and vision of Charles Burchfield. According to the website, the museum holds the largest public collection of works by Burchfield as well as more than 70 volumes of handwritten journals, 25,000 drawings and other items including a scale re-creation of the artist’s Gardenville studio.

President Lyndon B. Johnson eulogized the artist in a letter dated Nov. 14, 1967, stating that “[Burchfield] was artist to America.”

email: jwaters@beenews.com

For more, click here.