Newsletter: Spring /Summer 2003

Best known for his visionary and luminous watercolor landscapes, Burchfield also was a gifted and energetic draftsman. His large oeuvre included subconscious doodles, elaborate revisions of his watercolors and paintings, and working studies such as this example, which represents a rural setting near Gardenville, New York, the Buffalo sub urb where he settled with his family in 1925. Executed during what is considered Burchfield's most realistic phase (the 1920s and 1930s), this small yet powerful composition conveys his predilection for personifying and animating domestic buildings (which he described as "often more moody than nature") and endowing the familiar and prosaic with an other worldly, transcendental character-here apparent in the ghostly huddle of houses and silhouetted church spire, which seem to emerge from a moonlit sea of snow drifts.