Untitled [Walking Person], January 10, 1918 1918

Editor: This is Charles Burchfield's "Untitled [Walking Person], January 10, 1918," made with watercolor and drawing. It’s got this wonderfully eerie quality to it, like a figure is emerging from the snowy landscape. How do you interpret this work from a formalist point of view? Curator: Note the composition, its spatial arrangements. The figure's silhouette, almost brutally simplified, strides down the avenue of receding architectural forms. Consider the colour palette; the sombre watercolor washes work against each other creating form with light and dark to create atmospheric unease. How do these features operate together? Editor: I guess it is a gloomy and depressing picture, made even more dramatic with the faceless silhouette of the figure contrasting against the stark snowy avenue. And the barren tree, looming like a gothic cathedral. I almost missed that at first. Curator: Indeed. Note also the materiality of the drawing: a crude, scratchy quality which emphasizes texture, the biting wintery wind against skin perhaps. In semiotic terms, we might view these textures as indexical signs, hinting at psychological interiority projected into exterior surroundings. Editor: That’s interesting, the idea that texture reflects feeling. So, ignoring anything outside the picture itself, you're saying we can decode an emotional state through these visual signifiers? Curator: Precisely. It’s through the relationship between line, colour, form and their specific arrangement, that meaning, even emotional resonance, arises. Editor: I never thought about focusing so exclusively on just the form. That provides a new insight. Curator: The key is disciplined seeing; that's where analysis starts. I wonder how we can push this methodology further…