Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)

This view of Buffalo Creek at Winspear Road is virtually identical to the setting directly across the street from Burchfield’s home on Clinton Street. On June 18, 1935 he “painted all afternoon and evening almost without break on a little group of trees near the water’s edge.”  He noted that the afternoon had been:

so full of infinite joy and beauty that it seems a desecration almost to try to write about it.  Low-flying loose misty clouds sweep endlessly out of the northeast, driven by a cool wind that was like a rarefied cold-shower.  I lay on a little bank awhile, reveling in the rich lushness of the countryside.  I did not realize how starved I was for the simple unaffected delights of purely natural things—

During her 2013 residency, Janelle Lynch produced photographs inspired by the work of Charles Burchfield in the Burchfield Nature & Art Center grounds by Buffalo Creek, having studied this painting and others. —NW