Charles Burchfield was an American painter born in 1893. At five Burchfield moved with his family to Salem, OH, where he spent his youth. From 1912 to 1916 he studied at the Cleveland School of Art, OH. He was awarded a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, New York, where he went in October 1916 but left after one day of classes. He returned to Salem in November, where he supported himself by working at a local metal-fabricating plant, and painted during his lunch-hours and at weekends.
Between 1915 and 1918 Burchfield painted small watercolors marked by their fantasy and arbitrary color. In these he often painted either visual equivalents of sounds in nature, as in The Insect Chorus (1917; Utica, NY, Munson–Williams–Proctor Inst.), or re-created childhood emotions, such as fear of the dark in Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night (1917; Cleveland, OH, Mus. A.). For these works he invented symbols in a sketchbook entitled Conventions for Abstract Thoughts(New York, Kennedy Gals) in which he identified his motifs with such labels as ‘Fear’, ‘Dangerous Brooding’ and ‘Fascination of Evil’. Other watercolors from this period reflect his deep love of nature, as in Dandelion Seed Balls and Trees (1917; New York, Met.). All Burchfield’s early watercolors have a strong decorative quality derived in part from oriental art, which he had admired at the Cleveland Museum of Art during his student days. However his use of expressive color and distortion of form were achieved independently of the example of European modernism, with which he was not familiar until much later.
In July 1918 Burchfield was drafted into the US Army, from which he was released in January 1919. In 1921 he became a designer for the wallpaper firm of M. H. Birge & Sons in Buffalo, NY, and in 1922 he married Bertha L. Kenreich. In 1925 he moved to a small house in Gardenville, a suburb of Buffalo, where he spent the rest of his life.
He was one of the last of many American pantheists and belonged to a tradition that began in the 19th century with writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and painters of the Hudson River school, and that later embraced the Luminists and even natural historians, including John Burroughs (1837–1921) and John Muir (1838–1914).
(SOURCE: John I. H. Baur. "Burchfield, Charles." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 4 Nov. 2016.
