ART REVIEW : Burchfield Watercolors Evoke Nature’s Odd Mystery

On a gray fall day in Salem, Ohio, in 1916, Charles Burchfield returned to Mullins Co. after his lunch hour. Quietly, he slid a stack of sketches into a drawer. Those drawings--which he would work up into intense, fevered watercolors at night or on the weekend--were the solitary young accountant’s impressions of the fields and woods of his hometown.

For him, every aspect of those familiar acres had its own vivid, seasonal personality.

A bright yellow star burns into faint brown branches in “Winter Sun Through Poplars” as if heralding a sacred event. The flickering white outlines of grasses and flowers piling up against an old brown building in “August Noon” teem with the buzz of unseen insects.

“The Early Works of Charles E. Burchfield: 1915-1921,” at the Laguna Art Museum through April 24, introduces a batch of watercolors extraordinary in their power to suggest the strange beauties and stark mysteries of nature.

Although related to the experimental, pantheistic approaches of other such U.S. painters as John Marin, Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove, Burchfield’s early style was an independent creation.

Pushing past the limits of his academic art school training to accommodate his emotional needs, Burchfield devised his own system of color equivalents and flat patterns. He often sketched these designs in pencil before painting and was apparently indifferent to the stray lines that showed through the finished works.

In 1917 (“the golden year of my career”), Burchfield’s brush strokes developed a staccato pulse that he used to illustrate smoke puffing delicately from industrial chimneys as well as the scrubby, haunting feeling of “Starlit Woods” and the aura of delicious expectation hovering above trees and grasses at the onset of a “June Sunset.”

The following year, intrigued by Sherwood Anderson’s personifications of houses in “Winesburg, Ohio,” Burchfield embarked on a melodramatic series of eerie, groaning dwellings.

As if played out by such excess, Burchfield let his style dry up into anecdotal reports on Midwestern life, infrequently spiced with the fierce, glowing symbolism of “Star and Fires” or the skittering calligraphy of “Wind.”

The exhibition--organized by the Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art--ends with these paintings, produced just before the artist moved to Buffalo, N.Y.

There, the pedestrian “American scene” realism that had already begun to nibble away at his visionary approach yielded commercial success, allowing him to retire from the 9-to-5 world at 36 and devote his days to painting.

But his innate sensitivity to the natural world won out in the end. In the last two decades of his life--he died in 1967--Burchfield returned on a grander scale to the moody synesthesia of his youth and produced his major body of work.

Also on view (through May 8) as part of the Laguna Art Museum’s “California Contemporary Artists” series are metal sculptures by Michael Todd and paintings by Liga Pang.

Fashioned from various kinds of steel or patinated bronze, most of Todd’s welded pieces involve a limited repertoire of small geometric and free-form shapes snagged by a large circle. None of the rods and blobs and little boxes in these “Tantric” pieces go too far into space, so each little universe remains serenely, if predictably, limited to a single spatial plane.

Todd’s latest “Smoke” sculptures break with the eternal circle to imitate the upward draft of vaporous clouds. In one of these pieces, small upside-down flowerpot forms balance a pile-up of elongated jagged bits, which in turn support an airy upward-curling wire doodle.

Pang’s dream images from the past few years vary in impact. If some seem too trendily simplistic (like “Man Attacked by Fish,” a figure shrinking from the grip of a doglike beast), the best works are medleys of rich assortments of things that resist being puzzled out to the last detail.

“Moon Festival” is one of these. It scintillates with a spring feeling (soft green grass, purple mountains, a rabbit, trees glanced with strokes of salmon paint) and Oriental imagery (a red bridge, a plate of pink bean cakes). A deft hand keeps nostalgia fresh and bittersweet.

LAGUNA ART MUSEUM

“The Early Works of Charles E. Burchfield: 1915-1921” through April 24; “California Contemporary Artists: Liga Pang and Michael Todd,” through May 8

307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach

Open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is $2 general, $1 for students, seniors and children under 12

Information: (714) 494-6531