Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)

For his 1915 works, while still a student in the Cleveland School of Art, Burchfield "devised a simple formula" for laying color over a graphite drawing of the subject, which he described:

Everything was reduced to the twelve colors of the color wheel, plus black and white, with minimum modifications. Thus sunlit earth would be orange; shadows on it, red-violet; sunlit grass, yellow; shadows, blue or blue-green and so on. They were executed in flat pattern with little or no evidence of a third dimension.

This scene depicts Wade Park in Cleveland, where Burchfield derived inspiration outside of class. In the background, Trinity Cathedral appears in shadowy contours; Burchfield went to an organ recital there on January 6, 1914.

(text by Nancy Weekly)