Art Print:  November Evening by Charles Burchfield.  A Review by G. E. Claire. 
Copyright 2011 by G. E. Claire.


       It needs to be said what you can do with a sky.  This is a big dark brooding American sky over a middle-ground of gold wheat grass, storm-golden, and red false-front buildings.  The low layer of sky doesn’t touch the grass except in the implied background; we are left to wander under the vast shapes of darkened blue-green clouds.  Quick  ---  we must get our horses in and our long horse cart on four wagon-wheels.  
        We have just passed the old branches of a stump-tree.
        We are on the long brown road soon to muddy in its own vast outdoor world.
        The farmer’s coat is well-done, for he has a collar and he needs one.  It is brown also, in such a way as to distinguish him from cart and wood and wheel and wheat and fence and road; but yet again he is American; he is brown; he is tied to the land, the astonishing land. You want to live there, though it is evening.  For you have felt that sky before.  You have seen brown and blue as rich and as true.  
         You know the light (is there a name for it?)  --  But it is in your memory just as it is, reflected in the old glass of a wooden row of human habitation.  --- G.E.C.

Rakesh
3/9/2012 11:00:21 pm

nice post

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    Author

    G. Claire is a descendant of Welsh Immigrants who came to California during the time of "the Great Excitement," also known as the Gold Rush.  She is, in addition, a descendant of young Mayflower passenger Mary Allerton and of Thomas Cushman, an Elder of the Plymouth Church.  The author is proud to be descended from Silvanus Brown, a member of that most notorious group of Vermont mobsters known as The Green Mountain boys.

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