Book excerpt: Charles Burchfeild, one of the finest American watercolorists of the 20th century- and perhaps our greatest visionary - used watercolors with weight, power and flexibility to achieve a variety of effects unprecedented in scale and technique for the medium. Working out of the 19th-century Romantic tradition in which nature's primordial energy is revealed throught the drama of human emotions, Burchfield makes the commonplace extraordinary, the everyday miraculous.