Charles Burchfield at the Brandywine Museum

The American painter Charles Ephraim Burchfield, who died in 1967 at the age of 73, never lost his inner child. At the same time, he was far from a primitive artist, possessing a highly sophisticated grasp of modern idioms and techniques — and, as evidenced in the journals he kept from the age of 17 until his death, a penetrating literary intelligence.

Burchfield loved the natural world as Van Gogh loved it: not as an object of contemplation but as a dynamic and all but engulfing experience that forever trembled on the edge of vision. As with Van Gogh, you don’t look at Burchfield’s pictures; you are in them.

Burchfield was almost certainly synesthetic — that is, he experienced different sensory experiences simultaneously. For example, he seemed to have heard sounds and felt olfactory sensations in colors, and experienced colors and scents in sounds.

Beauty and terror

Neurologists have sought to explain this phenomenon by positing that certain neurons that gradually disaggregate in a child’s brain to create separate and distinct areas of sense perception remain linked (to a greater or lesser extent) in the adult synesthete. This condition has nothing to do with cognitive ability (or at least I would hope so, being a synesthete myself).

In Burchfield’s case, the world seems to have presented itself as an overlapping sensory field. He wanted to get it all into his art but only by using what is for most people a single faculty: that of sight.

At the same time, the world never lost its spookiness for Burchfield. That is, he responded not merely to its beauty but to its terror. Adults don’t ordinarily see nature as threatening; it’s just there, and in order to frighten ourselves sufficiently to consider it an adversary, we resort to risky activities like mountain climbing or bungee jumping, or we picture it as stormy and treacherous — the Baroque or Romantic Sublime. Burchfield needed no such aids; concealed eyes seem to stare at us from his abandoned farmhouses and treetops. They’re never explicitly there, but in a Burchfield picture you’re not just looking at a scene; you’re being watched by it.

Burchfield left some 1,400 paintings but also a huge trove of graphic work, and some of the finest examples of the latter are on display in the Brandywine Museum’s show of his large-scale watercolors. All of them were meant as fully independent works, and Burchfield labored on some of them for 30 years or more. For example, Nighthawks at Twilight, begun in 1917 wasn’t completed in its final form until 1949.

Throbbing energy

Nighthawks in many ways displays Burchfield at his disturbing best. The hawks in question plunge and rise against the darkening sky. A wood sits at the edge of a cleared space, partially reclaimed by grasses and wildflowers, with a large, semi-obscured stone in the foreground, part rune and part obstacle. The trees — heavy pines lined up like soldiers in winter coats — appear to be ready to march, like Shakespeare’s Birnam Wood in Macbeth. A black, caped outline goes clear around their tops, with eyelike gaps that suggest a child’s-eye view of Halloween spirits. Accent marks above this outline indicate a flock of birds, but similar strokes recur in Burchfield’s other works, too, as a more generalized index of movement and sound.

At the very edge of the frame, pulling the entire composition toward it, stands a withered tree stump with two raised, forking branches and hollows that suggest tortured eyes and a mouth. Each branch has a spur that resembles, perhaps, the stylized beak of an archaic bird. But none of this is certain, and the only constant in the picture is the sense of motion and metamorphosis. The final effect is charged and unsettling, with a restless, throbbing energy that holds the viewer in its grip.

Burchfield clearly responded to weather of all kinds because weather is the sensory experience par excellence, the term under which life itself functions. He loved to stand out in it, particularly at the change of seasons when its sudden humors and caprices were most evident. A late spring storm observed off his porch in Ohio is rendered in swift, slashing strokes that convey a sense both of nature’s exhilaration and the artist’s own. At such moments, Charles Burchfield is a man carried off with the pleasure of being alive, and he carries us with him.

Left-handed compliment

Was there a final meaning behind it all for Burchfield? Some of his works seem suffused with the kind of religious exaltation that rejects all dogma, at times in the stillness of a winter landscape and at times in the radiance of a summer one. But the work is always anchored in painstakingly observed detail, however freely rendered, and the objective is not to get beyond nature but deeper into it. No God but in things: If Burchfield had a religion, that was it. And if the God were there, he could lift you up or break your back with equal casualness. The point was just to go on looking, and sensing, and feeling.

Burchfield made the mistake of being born in the Midwest, and he never cared much for cities. Because he painted the depressed towns around him in the 1930s, he was lumped together with the so-called Regionalist school of that period. It was an association he despised and which does not, in fact, describe him. Like Marsden Hartley, Burchfield was simply an original.

His colleague Edward Hopper, with whom he may be usefully contrasted, remarked that Burchfield’s work was founded “not on art, but on life.” It was the sort of left-handed compliment that Hopper was apt to bestow. But whereas Hopper’s own depiction of nature suggests the void he found in it, what Burchfield gives us is its brimming fullness. That is a considerable gift.