I often use the term, “Burtonesque” when discussing imagery that has a dark, distorted, almost surreal feel to it, mostly due to the fact that in our modern culture, you would be hard pressed to find someone not familiar with the likes of A Nightmare Before Christmas, Batman or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I have no doubt that Burton was influenced by a number of things, including art that preceded his time. Charles Burchfield would seem could have been one of those individuals. I was actually unfamiliar with this artist except for a 2 inch picture in a first year art text book of mine. But in doing some research, I have found that Charles Burchfield was an American painter that lived at the onset of the 20th century, was friends with my first blog artist, Edward Hopper, and in fact painted in slightly different styles based on different times of his life. I chose this painting “The Night Wind” as it was the first piece of his work that caught my attention. However, he will not be one that continues to go unnoticed by this constant art student. There is definitively a pattern in my aesthetics when it comes to art. I like earth tones. Check. I like dark, moody imagery. Check. I like pieces of art that ultimately are greater than the sum of its parts. It becomes obvious why this piece was chosen. Again, like Crospey with its strong abstract underlying composition and Inness with his more openly abstract composition, Burchfield goes one step farther on his trek to abstraction, yet, still maintains a connection to reality through his use of subject matter, a house, the type each one of us has seen, visited or grew up in. The circular focal points, windows in this case, lead the viewer to look inside the house. There is more going on inside than we know and we are invited in due to warmer tones used in those areas than in any other area of the painting. Even with its darker mood, I still feel a warmth from it, partly because of my preceding statement on the windows, but also because, and I may be dating myself here, the fact that it evokes in me images of my childhood watching old Disney cartoons on the Disney Channel. One particular cartoon comes to mind of a night scene in a graveyard where skeletons are dancing on gravestones. Frightening imagery in and of itself, yet it was presented in a childlike way, a way that was more comforting than disturbing. Burchfield has captured this as well. Mr. Burton should be thankful.

I am pleased to be sharing this image with you today. This digital painting called “Tucked Away” was done by a contemporary illustrator, a fellow student of mine at the Illustration Master Class 2008 and friend named Eric Deschamps. Eric is a young up and coming artist and has done work for Wizards of the Coast, Activision and Upper Deck amongst others. This particular image appears to be in bookcover format based on dimensions and the space left for text that typically is designed into an image to be used for that purpose. Obviously a fantasy piece, this image portrays a young girl, who with her friends and “alien” companions have made a trek through some near earthlike (if not actually earth) forest and have found a mystical bauble of unknown origin and purpose to the reader. The imagery alone, assuming it is to be a bookcover affectively gives the browser alot of information about the contents of this book.
In analyzing the composition of this piece, it is worth noting that the color palette is bright and vibrant and it is obvious that Eric chose it due to the subject matter which relates to young adult fantasy. This genre is often illustrated with this type of palette which help emphasizes youth and youthful vibrance and energy. There are a number of compositional things that make this a very strong image. There is movement created by the diagonals made by the creature’s wings, the top of the log and line of the water. A worm’s eye viewpoint helps to increase to size and depth of the background space while allowing for a direct focus on the main figure considering she is at ground level. Movement is also created by the curves of the creatures wings, the water rings expanding from the point where her arm meets the water, the floating leaves in the foreground falling to the water and the girl’s hair which is being affected by gravity. Eric has used another compositional technique relating to color in which the girl is associated to her creature pal and the glowing bauble by color, a color that is not used anywhere else in the painting. He has also chosen a loose split complimentary color scheme of orange, blue-green and blue violet which in addition to a few analogous colors to this frame color scheme adds strength to the design. Ultimately, this is an extremely strong image due to Eric’s obvious attention to design detail and fundamentals. If this image is or becomes an actual book cover, I’ll buy it. And I would like to also thank Eric for allowing me to analyze a piece of his art.