Charles E. Burchfield

He was born in Ashtabula, Ohio, in 1893 and raised by his widowed mother in Salem. At the Cleveland Institute of Art, his chief discovery was Asian art: Hiroshige and Hokusai influenced his use of line and compositional flattening. After graduating in 1916, he spent one formative summer painting watercolours of the Ohio landscape with an intensity that anticipated everything he would do later. The youthful works depict weather, sound and seasonal mood as near-abstract patterns, closer to Expressionism than to any American tradition.

Then he got engaged, moved to Buffalo in 1921 and took a job designing wallpaper at the H.M. Birge company. For twenty years his painting shifted to small-town and industrial scenes, produced partly for the New York market and partly from genuine fascination with American vernacular architecture. The middle-period work is realist, descriptive, and commercially successful.

In 1943 he returned to the visionary landscapes of his youth, literally: he took early watercolours, added strips of paper to expand them, and reworked them into larger, more hallucinatory compositions where trees pulsate, weather has texture and the natural world vibrates with animist presence. He worked exclusively in watercolour, standing at an easel, using a dry-brush technique on machine-made paper. He died in 1967, at seventy-three, leaving behind seventy volumes of journals.