I feel guilty about not blogging more about this city I'm currently enjoying! So a quick entry about an exhibit I recently saw at the Whitney: I don't think I'd ever heard of Charles Burchfield before going to the current exhibit at the Whitney, which made this discovery all the more interesting. And he's from upstate NY, too! But the Buffalo area, not from my neck of the woods.
Anyhow, you can check out Wikipedia for all the details on his life etc. Basically, a 20th-century American artist focused primarily on natural scenes. However, he deliberately avoided literal translation of nature onto the canvas, trying instead to accentuate the fantastical elements he found there. He had a banner year in 1917, including "The Night Wind" (above) and a host of other works, but later went into kind of a dormant period while working as a wallpaper designer for a local company. But later in life, he revisited some of his earlier works, was inspired by them, and painted larger scenes around some of them. You might think he could've ruined some great work he'd done at an ealier age, but in fact some of these revised works are just fantastic.
So Charles Burchfield for you, in a nutshell. If you're going to be in New York soon, check out the show.
1 comment:
Nobody's forcing you to read this blog, you know. Don't you have any better things to do over there in Japan? Have you run out of manga? What about Pokemon cards?
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