Mike GIier (b. 1953)

SEASONALITY

MG: There are a few topics to consider in this grouping. Let’s start with the three drawings. The smallest is a field sketch of an ash leaf that I have complicated by making it a rhythmic pattern as if it’s waving in the wind. My larger drawing, A Light Breeze…v. 1, is a studio drawing in which I elaborated on the field sketch by adding vertical elements to suggest trees. The Burchfield drawing is similar in that a complex natural form, a crow, is reduced into a simple descriptive shape, but he often overlays his abstractions of form with metaphor.

NW: Burchfield’s menacing forms relate to his 1949 watercolor, Clatter of Crows in Spring Woods and his 1952 lithograph, Crows in March. Fascinated with the wildness and independence of crows, he felt: “There was a savagery about their angry cawing as they settle into the tree, that was very thrilling, even spine chilling—” The motifs have precedents in his 1917 Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, specifically Aimless Abstraction (Hypnotic Intensity) that looks like a child’s flying bird abstraction, and Fear, which resembles a double-horned serpent’s head. Abstraction, which he preferred to call conventionalization, condenses sensory effects and symbolic meaning.

MG: I certainly feel the “hypnotic intensity” and “fear”! This drawing also feels chilly, like it’s a crow in winter. It’s funny, but I can’t work on a picture out of season. If I have a winter picture, for example, that’s not finished as the warm weather moves in, I have to wait six months until the earth warms and the summer colors reappear to finish up. Was Burchfield like this? 

NW: Absolutely—he even waited decades for similar weather and light to trigger the right moment to return to a particular work.

MG: There’s something very grand about working seasonally for artists whose practice is based in the direct observation of nature. Plein air paintings are responsive to a particular place at a particular time and as such appear to have modest intentions. But dedicated observers of nature like Charles Burchfield, who draw and paint through the seasons, record something so vast that it is beyond perception, i.e. the yearly tilt of the earth on its axis as it travels around the sun; it is an event so large that it can only be perceived indirectly as shifts in light and temperature. 

NW: Burchfield also painted specific months, works suggesting compass points, and mid-season transitions, showing vital, perceptual changes between the seasons regardless of calendar dates. These concepts were inspired by Chinese scroll paintings he saw in 1914. Their fascinating portrayal of time-based narratives led him to create progressive transitions of seasons uniquely within a single, large artwork. Among his most ambitious works, are anticipatory visions in which the foreground represents one season, while through lacunae we can see pale elements in the distance predicting the future season. He reversed that effect in Early Spring, where an endless field of cadmium yellow dandelions, like miniature suns, force remnants of snowy winter to creep back into sinister cathedral woods in the distance.

MG: As you noted, all my work in this show was created around the period of my residency at the Burchfield Penney and most of it is from a single series entitled, Answer Music. Answer Music is another term for “call and response,” a form of worship in which the preacher makes a declaration, and the congregation responds with fervid unity. A Light Breeze… is a good example of the parameters of the series. I compose these pictures on horizontal bands as if I was writing a musical score and when I’m composing, I like to think of musical terms that have an equivalent in visual art like, rhythm, repetition, harmony, contrast, motif, volume, chord and color. When I’m out making sketches for the paintings, I try to create motifs that I can write as a line, like a script. This picture has two leaf scripts, one based on an ash leaf and the other on burning bush (euonymus). Into these, I inserted a repetitive line of trees in varying intervals and like a bass line, a waveform is woven through them. Improvisations of form and color in the leaf scripts provide a harmonic melody. 

NW: Like you, Burchfield made countless field studies of landscape details from which he would build the structure of his paintings. Sounds and scents were as important as visual observations. We own thousands that provide insight into his process, augmented by color notes and other shorthand comments made directly on his sketches as well as journal accounts, memories, and review of folio contents of similar subjects. Ultimately, he wanted to create art that goes far beyond the visual realm to share spiritual, experiential connections to Nature with a capital N.

MG:  When I draw outside, I feel like the place in which I am sitting is giving me little gifts. It gives me shapes, textures, colors, sounds and sensations as prompts and with appreciation, I return the gift in the form of a drawing or painting. I am reluctant to describe this exchange as if it were a relationship with another sentient being, since it suggests I’ve gone a little nutty, and strayed from rationality to favor magic! But there is something here worth considering and it’s not necessarily at odds with rational thinking that drives science and provides so many good things. Imagining the human relationship with nature as one of reciprocity, or more simply, thinking of it as a culture of gift exchange, may be the turn of mind necessary to counter the extremes of rationality that have provided argument for taking too much and depleting the natural world to the point of crisis. For me, Burchfield is the leading example of an artist conceiving the natural world as a collaborator in creation, who highlights, through multi-sensory abstraction, a profound exchange. He also makes his love and respect for his partner evident in every picture!