Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)

10. like silvery heat-waves –

     Lunch over, I set out in earnest to find a painting subject. I went to my original objective point – It was beautiful here; especially the vast rolling uplands to the northeast half lost in the haze, but lighter fields + gleaming thru, sun-lit.

     A house had once stood here, betrayed by the tangle of myrtle, burning bush, and other shrubs which do not naturally grow wild. I discovered some strong thick stumpy saplings, resembling the ailanthus a little, but bristling with thorns. These, with the great leaf-scars, made them very striking. I cut off a few to take home.

     Try as hard as I could, I could not get the impulse to paint. So I drove on to the great pines; and then eastward to Dale road, which I followed for a short distance, then went east over a narrow dirt road that led up over the table land.

     Half-way up, I stopped to inspect an abandoned house, and then an old barb wire fence, with crazy posts staggering down the hill, over-grown with goldenrod, silvery in the sunlight attracted me and I realized I had found what I had been searching for the two days – a scene to express the essence of Indian Summer – How truly Southwest the sky where the sun was sinking was – its light fell strikingly across the rolling rise of land to the west, dissipating as the earth turned down into the valley. I put the sun in the extreme upper left hand corner to give the feeling of it disappearing for the winter to the S.W; with the goldenrod – fence-row extending from the lower left