Charles Burchfield, Journals, December 21,1914

When I wrote my dispirited entry of December 15, I had not reckoned with the wind.  I remember now there was no wind that day.

There was a wind today!  It was my ideal wind - not a steady rush of air, but a spasmodic or spontaneous outbursts, in great swooping circles. - I could watch its course in the frantic tree- branches.  I spent an hour or so carrying out the ashes from the furnace - and thus I got the wind anew at each trip.  The sky was wierd (sic)- it was light at the horizon, against which glittered the trees, the small sky areas sparkling like stars thru the network of branches; and black at the zenith.

The wind invited to a fields ramble.  But I was held at home by various duties.

The snow is coated with brilliant layer of ice.

Have finished reading the second part of Fonseka’s “On the Truth of Decorative Art” - On Decorating Art.

“Your notion of artistic creation is as blasphemous as your notion of the contemplative life (?) [i.e -- the idea of re-creation].

“You should not emulate God, not duplicate creation but stay on earth and beautify.”

“Perfect art is the perfect union of utility and embellishment (?).

Art is not an escape from life by an alleviation of living, a levamentum laboris - a recreation.”

“Form then is meaningless apart from utility.

“Consider the work of Walt Whitman - there is emotion creating its own form - and Browning, and Wordsworth (??)

There is only one true way in art – the chaste and narrow way of convention religion is its strait gate” (??)

A conventional art is intelligible without religion - for the alphabet of art is learnt in the school of religion (??)

“Hieratic art is the only democratic art ----- the art of Egypt was understood by the people of Egypt, whereas you were art, is understood by few besides the artists.   The elect among you where the orchids of art.

---- Consider again the art of Greece, also a conventional art inspired by religion.  For this reason and because it never lost sight of the idea of utility the best Greek art was always popular. ---- at Alexandria, man first became offensively personal But let us return to Athens ----- here art was impersonal ----- nowadays your artist needs many friendly critics while he is living and many well-intentioned biographers after he is dead to explain ‘The Man + his Message’ and still the public is bewildered.”

“Think of the latest development in your art of painting - the school of Mural Decoration ---- Decoration, mark you is the end - decoration for its own sake ---- But the end of decorative art is to make beautiful things of use, - to make a beautiful building, decorate its walls if necessary, but first to make the building itself beautiful in form - not merely to decorate the walls of any formless building ---- Your modern mural decorator, because he is a modern artist, will merely turn the wall into a medium of expression.”(??)

“This self-consciousness is the first error in your modern symbolism ---- whereas true symbols have grown spontaneously and unconsciously you now try to manufacture them artificially as a further aid to self-expression.

“Language is the channel of thought but too much meaning makes of language and incontinent river.”

“It may be that repression is the secret of perpetual youth in the life and art of a people”

“You make your gods in the likeness of men.  God made man in His image and like, it is true (?) but you seem to think God made only man. (??)

“That futile truce less controversy on among you between the artist and moralist, first opened by Plato, the never have arisen if Greek Art had always been as symbolical as at first, without degenerating into realism.”

---- for the Eastern Artist never tries to reproduce the external forms of nature, but rather to represent the Ideas which they Embody.”

“The genius is, without metaphor, the seer of visions.”

The image of God once visualized is thereafter made conventional, the symbolism prescribed by cannons.  (But is there no escape from this stagnation?)

“A religion is in attempts at interpreting the universe and symbols suggest the connections we have discovered.  (Hugh Black-religion is trying to find out the world as it ought to be.)

“Western Art may not use symbols because Western Civilization has been a universal process of mistaking means for ends. -- Arts is an end thought is an end; education, emotion, experience democracy - all these are ends.

“An impersonal art has a higher degree of excellence than a personal art for the same reason that made Aristotle say that poetry is a more universal and truer thing than history.  Your art in fact, is a series of petty histories ---- the symbol which is an abstract convention, makes art always preserve its universal character - and so art reacts on life in this way, that we in turn become selfless and see in our lives only the working of universal laws. ----- Consider the conventional image of the Buddha.  To the serenity expressed in that symbol is probably due to the serenity of Eastern life

“Shakespeare had a supreme sense of irony when he said that the world is a stage after he had done his best to deprive life of its spectacular element”

“The representation of undesirable things in art gives these undesirable things of fresh tenure in life. ----- When you make the artists craving for self-expression the basis of art, rather than the beautifying of life, you give ugliness a sanction in art, and evil a sanction in life.”

Charles E. Burchfield, December 21, 1914