“Rust-Flavored Air”:

The verso of Charles Burchfield’s 1920 watercolor Hillside Homes reveals contextual information not afforded by the work’s title. Here, the artist’s hand-written inscription reads: “LOCALITY-ON THE OHIO RIVER/BETWEEN E. LIVERPOOL + WELLSVILLE.” Roland Barthes observes that such accompanying text functions as a “parasitic message” intended to load an image by quickening its connotation procedures. Taking this “parasitic message” as starting point, this paper employs new materialism and ecocriticism to read Hillside Homes as Burchfield’s toxic discourse on environmental damage caused by southeastern Ohio’s thriving clay industry during the early twentieth century. My analysis examines Hillside Homes in relation to contemporaneous textual accounts of the region’s ecological welfare from the artist’s personal journals and the geologist James Harold Hance’s 1918 PhD dissertation “Geology and Mineral Resources of the Wellsville, Ohio, Quadrangle.” Ultimately, this watercolor is both a prescient commentary on ecological toxicity and a material product of distributed agency that records natural degradation not only in subject matter, but also in its deteriorated physical condition resulting from environmental exposure. Conceiving of Hillside Homes as an assemblage—Jane Bennett’s term to describe the complex, interconnected, and surprising networks of agents that act upon material things—helps to explain one of its distinct visual features: the soiled yellow smog that discolors the blue sky. A study of this unplanned formal quality, a result of the paper’s reaction to relative humidity, acidity, or pollution, challenges 2 preconceived notions of artist intentionality. Heeding the call of Lawrence Buell, this piece aims to reinvigorate scholarly understanding of Burchfield’s work through a more earth-conscious mode of art historical inquiry.