[2] While he did think of being a nature writer in high school, he eventually focused entirely on the visual aspect of his creativity, writing short descriptive pieces for the painting on the back of the mount.

Burchfield has been more recently described as "the mystic, cryptic painter of transcendental landscapes, trees with telekinetic halos, and haunted houses emanating ectoplasmic auras.

"[6] Jerry Saltz suggests his influences as van Gogh, Caspar David Friedrich, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, "calendar art, and Sunday painting."

[7]: 16 His work is usually divided into three periods, comprising figuration; houses and small town scenes; and abstractions depicting moods (frequently morbid and fearful).

Burchfield's style was largely developed by the summer of 1915, after his junior year at the Cleveland School of Art, as he sketched and painted constantly in and around Salem, OH, "gathering the materials for a lifetime," according to his journals.

Biographers note his exposure to modernist trends and traditional Chinese painting while in art school but overlook that the hallucinatory quality in his work may be partly traced to an episode of nervous exhaustion in 1911.

While a junior in high school, determined to record all the area's flowering plants that spring, he stayed up late at night, painting whole bouquets of the blooms, and had a bout of what was referred to at the time as "brain fever," which might now be termed mania.

Though one critic commented that Burchfield was "Edward Hopper on a rainy day," a 1936 Life Magazine article named him one of America's 10 greatest painters.

In his writings he expressed an aim to depict an earlier era in the history of human consciousness when man saw gods and spirits in natural objects and forces.

Art historian and critic John Canaday predicted in a 1966 review in The New York Times that the grandeur and power of these pictures would be Burchfield's enduring achievement.

Of his current legacy, Saltz writes that "Consciously or not, recent painters like Peter Doig, Verne Dawson, Gregory Amenoff, Kurt Lightner, and Ellen Altfest are channeling bits of Burchfield's visionary vibe.