The Notebooks of Charles Burchfield, an Heir of Thoreau and Whitman, Showcase the Painter’s Metaphysical Longings
Though his work is included in important collections and has been the subject of museum exhibitions, Burchfield doesn’t carry the high profile of his friend Edward Hopper.
“We have been amusing ourselves the last few evenings telling the temperature by counting the notes of the tree-crickets” wrote the American painter, Charles Burchfield, on September 1, 1938. “The formula,” he mentions in a parenthetical comment, is “the number of notes in 13 seconds, added to 42.” Can someone from the American Meteorology Society confirm or deny this methodology? Burchfield found it “remarkably accurate.”
The above is an excerpt from the artist’s 72 notebooks, a lifelong pursuit that would eventually number 10,000 pages. In 1993, the State University of New York at Purchase published “Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place,” a book in which a SUNY Buffalo professor of English, J. Benjamin Townsend, culled the entries to a mere 740 pages.
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