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Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield
 
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Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield [Hardcover]

Robert Gober (Author), Cynthia Burlingham (Editor)
4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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Book Description

October 1, 2009
Offering a comprehensive overview of Charles Burchfield s work, this book presents the artist s expressive watercolors and provides a definitive
account of his life and career.

Working almost exclusively in watercolour, Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) focused on his immediate surroundings-his garden, the views from his windows, snow turning to slush, sudden atmospheric changes, or the forest at dusk. He often imbued these subjects with highly expressionistic light, creating at times a clear-eyed description of the world and at other times, a unique mystical and visionary experience of nature. The book includes drawings from his 1917 sketchbook, Conventions for Abstract ThoughtsA"; watercolors from 1916-18 that were the focus of the first one-person exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1930; camouflage designs from his tour in the army and wallpaper designs from the 1920s; watercolors from the 1940s showing the artist's unique technique of expanding and reworking earlier works by pasting large strips of paper around them to dramatically increase their size; and finally Burchfield's large, transcendental watercolours from the 1950s and 1960s.

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Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield + Charles Burchfield: Fifty Years as a Painter + Charles Burchfield's Seasons (Essential Paintings Series)
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Robert Gober is a sculptor whose work has been shown extensively worldwide. In 2001 he was chosen to represent the United States in the 49th Venice Biennale, and in 2007 the Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland, presented a thirty-year retrospective.
Cynthia Burlingham is Deputy Director of Collections and Director of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 176 pages
  • Publisher: Prestel USA; 1St Edition edition (October 1, 2009)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 3791343807
  • ISBN-13: 978-3791343808
  • Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 9.4 x 1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #67,456 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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Average Customer Review
4.8 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A different perspective on the work of this American watercolorist, August 7, 2010
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This review is from: Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield (Hardcover)
This book was published on the occasion of an exhibition of Charles Burchfield's works (2009 - 2010) that was curated by the artist, Robert Gober. Even if you've read other books about Burchfield, or have viewed other exhibitions of his watercolors, "Heat Waves in a Swamp" offers a new perspective, with an emphasis on the symbolism in his works. Essays by Cynthia Burlingham, Dave Hickey, Tullis Johnson, and Nancy Weekly are also included, and offer fresh points of view about this artist's life and work (not all of them raves). Charles Burchfield was a synesthete who worked all of his creative life to translate his sensory visions of nature into art.

Other treatments of Burchfield's symbolic content usually focus on his incorporation of vision and sound into his paintings. He used `agitrons' (cartoon-strip squiggles) to indicate movement, `squeans' (asterisks with empty centers) for shafts of sunlight, and `blurgits' (Burchfield describes them as `shrill high pinpoints') for the sounds of insects.

However this book stresses the artist's invention of a shorthand for abstract thoughts and emotions such as 'insanity' and 'morbid brooding' ('emoticons' you could say, although this book doesn't use that term). When I paged through 'Heat Waves' for the first time to look at the pictures, I wondered why so many of the full-page color plates were devoted to Burchfield's doodles. This emphasis was made clear in Nancy Weekly's essay, "Conventions for Abstract Thoughts" which decodes his language of symbols and shows where the symbols occur in his paintings. Here is her partial deconstruction of Burchfield's "Childhood's Garden" (1917) with his motifs in single quotes:

"...Six tiny Johnny-jump-ups with grimacing faces surely represent Charles and his five siblings huddled by their mother--a salmon nasturtium with a crying 'Melancholy/Sadness' mouth...Billowing clouds loom as 'The memory of pleasant things that are gone, perhaps forever' and are punctuated with 'Aimless Abstraction (Hypnotic Intensity).'"

Tullis Johnson follows Weekly's essay with his "A Seemingly Idle Diversion: The Doodles of Charles Burchfield" which continues the theme.

The overall effect of this symbolism shapes this artist's unique, mystical vision of nature--a vision that resonates in harmony with the world that I see outside my window. This book is a very stimulating treatment of his art.
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Most excellent art/coffee table book, July 6, 2010
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This review is from: Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield (Hardcover)
This book not only shows off the excellent work by Charles Burchfield, but also provides insight into his life, the life of an artist. The organization and editing was very good, easy to read.
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10 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Bravo!, December 8, 2009
This review is from: Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield (Hardcover)
Beautiful reproductions of the work of one of my favorite artists. Burchfield is a true mystic. His vision is psychedelic.
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