Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Charles Burchfield was an anomaly in the modern art world. For much of his early career, he worked in relative artistic isolation in Salem, Ohio, far from the avant-garde influences of New York City or Paris. Nonetheless, his lyrical landscapes were as revolutionary in their use of color and abstraction as his modernist contemporaries. It was, however, Burchfield’s midwestern roots that gave him a deeply personal, almost spiritual connection to nature. He felt intensely through not only his eyes but also his ears. Nineteen seventeen—which he called his “golden year”—marked the beginning of his experimentation with the visualization of sound. Inspired by the transition of the seasons, Burchfield captured nature’s song—the rustle of leaves, a bubbling brook, birds’ songs, and crickets’ choruses—through an idiosyncratic system of calligraphic marks.