Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967), The Golden Glow of Summer, 1964; Watercolor on paper, 40 x 27 inches; Image from the Burchfield Penney Art Center archives
Charles Burchfield, Journals, July 16, 1934
Sunday, Jul 16, 2017
It is wonderful to come back again to what is nearest and dearest to one (sic) heart again after having made a protracted excursion into new and alien fields. Getting a car was such a new and radical thing for me, learning to drive it so absorbing, and then the sheer delight of driving after possession so complete, that my painting, and pleasure in meditation of nature seemed to recede far far back into some remote past. There was a short time when it became so dim that I wondered foolishly whether it would ever come to me again.
I can’t remember when the reaction started, but this morning it seems as tho, just sitting on the bench in front of my studio, that life could hold no greater peace and delight.
This tiny corner of the earth that is ours gives a feeling of such deep content and security; this is the base to which we can always come back, and be ourselves, alone, completely free from the outside world. There is the sky, above the village housetops, so vast and mysterious, full of the great loose sunlit, wind-slanted clouds that always come after a summer storm – thru it I have access to infinity and down below, very tangible, is the yard and garden and how good all the things in it seem: the luxuriant tomato-plants, now in sharp sunlight, and again in temporary shadow, when a blueish green bloom on the leaves becomes visible, young pale yellow-green tomatoes showing thru; the bed of vigorous cannae, the leaves struggling upward in whorled fashion; beyond them the crazy hap onions with their crazy haphazard growth, and the orange day-lilies; on the right in the shade of the pine-trees, the confusion of the children’s gardens with their predominating note of bouncing bet. It being Monday morning into the garden like the prow of a ship, juts a triangle of freshly washed clean-looking clothes, brilliant in the raw sunshine, cut by the slender shaft of the young birch-tree with its lacy drooping foliage.
And beyond, the garage and the house and up over them into the sky again. At times the children pass thru intent on their play seemingly unconscious of my presence; sometimes a wren sings and there are the various sounds of village activities, all colored by the morning. The dull roar of motors passing on the street, seem remote.
Charles Burchfield, July 16, 1934