Charles Burchfield, Journals, December 17, 1914

Continued fine cold weather with the bright sunlight. We had diverse things to carry at morning to school and we took car. Every window was an imaginative world of frost I wonder if I lost some of the enjoyment of it regretting I could not paint it?

The air was full of the sound of musical creaking of people’s feet and wagons as if the frost in the morning air tinkled jarred by the Suns first rays! On all sides the spurting blue puffs of human breath. On such morning the air seems full of stars though if we  look for them, they are not there.

Work “nose-deep-in-book fashion all day.

At dusk, after dance, through Wade Park; the lights make beautiful pictures against the yet light, emerald sky. They sparkle coldly and the creenkle of our feet seems born of their twinkling.

After supper with Miss Ames to her home to get painting. When I tell all of Duke’s + my trip to Wade Park the other evening, she relates of a similar evening spent in New York on a campus during a blizzard. I explain to her my constant dilemma i.e. (the fight between conventionalization and pure realism) and she told me that when I first came to school that my feelings for pure design was the strongest of anyone who ever came to school and that of the late she had seen none of it.

After I had met the family and had selected the picture (and her studio was a delight - it was situated at the end of the lot, a small out building heated by a gas stove and lighted by four gas chandeliers with no vulgarness or ornamentation) - paintings on all sides all of which appealed to me greatly) - to come back, I again brought up the subject of my puzzle. When I explained that I was trying to combine pictorial qualities with conventionalization she begged of me not to lose by sense of design. Our discussion led to color theory and representation any evening proved most enjoyable. We agreed on the point that Roe’s color and design theories were meant only for mechanical people who aspired to do things in good taste.

 Miss Ames asserted that the tendency of the present day was to glorify the “shell” of art; rather than the emotion – the people analyzed pictures by mechanical theories. She claimed that people were being educated to talk “words” without the slightest idea of their real meaning. Art, she said, is life, and that most people’s conception of art was a painting, whereas as art should be in all walks of life.

Afterwards we had lunch at 10:00: Also Mr. Ames + her sister, Sadie Ames. The latter is a humorist, one with a serious mind as all great humorists have. She kept us laughing.

On the way home, in the car I reveled in the scenes I saw. The blast furnaces were at full tilt presenting a weird scene - a halo cast of color. The frost on the panes seemed like great forests behind which glowed with peculiar rings the street lights.

Charles Burchfield, December 17, 1914