promethia_tenk (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
promethia_tenk) wrote2009-01-17 09:24 pm
promethia_tenk) wrote2009-01-17 09:24 pm
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Andrew Wyeth: An Appreciation
Andrew Wyeth is dead today. I cannot imagine that his passing—or anything I have to say on the subject—will be of much interest to anyone here, but I am writing this for myself because, although I live somewhere else now, Wyeth and I come from the same place. Or at least I imagine that we do.
I don’t consider myself much of an art person. I studied architecture and literature. For beauty, I prefer textiles and design and household objects to anything made to be hung on a wall. Until today, when I began reading articles on him, I knew little of Wyeth personally or of his ideas about his painting. But because I grew up in Chester County, near Chadds Ford where he lived and worked, Wyeth has always been there on the edges of my consciousness. Most of my memories of his paintings are from early childhood, of being bored, drug along by my parents to “that museum with the pig.” Actually, there are two pigs: a sculpture out back by the river that we got to climb on when we got too antsy, and a giant, bristled pig in a giant, bristled painting that rules over whole galleries of Wyeths (Andrew, Jamie, N.C.). I took these things for granted, as children do.
Chester County is a place as modern and wasted as any other. I grew up in a badly constructed 1960 split-level house. My daily landscape was strip malls and grocery store isles. The Brandywine River Museum, that converted stone barn serving as a temple to the Wyeth family, stands on the edge of the busy and commercial Route 1, barely 100 yards from the passing cars. And yet alongside all this modernity—next too it or behind it or perhaps right on top of it and occupying the same space—is another world to be seen by squinting in the slanting winter light or by turning down that side road, half-hidden in overgrown bushes. This is the world that Andrew Wyeth painted.
There is a cornfield that still stands by my parents’ house; I rode by it every day on my way to school. I would sit by myself on the bus and, just as I knew we had reached the field, would look over my shoulder to follow the stalk-stubble hills as they curved against a gray backdrop of trees. That curve, the trees, the silence: 15 seconds of prayer, although I am not religious. And then as quickly as we got there we were past, and that other world I had slipped into in that moment of looking had disappeared again.
My childhood is full of those moments. Of walking in blank, winter forests. Of spying stone or brick through the flaking whitewash of a wall. Of following tour-guides through the staid halls of an old DuPont mansion, holding my hands behind my back. Of gazing through the rippled glass of a window. Of sitting in a canoe on the Brandywine, looking past the water dripping off my paddle, looking at the power lines dipping, reverent, over the floodplain. All these things simply were. Then, of course, I went away and discovered that the world is a brasher place than I had imagined, where these things do not exist so close to the surface. I discovered too that in the outside world these moments—of being, of mindfulness—are not gifts to be stumbled upon, not a birthright, but must be stolen, willfully, and often with others watching on and waiting for you, impatient. When I realized these things, I turned to Andrew Wyeth, who had lived where I had lived, who had seen what I had seen, and had put onto paper the field and the whitewash and even the power lines, dipping against the sky.
I remember being surprised, as a teenager, to find that Wyeth painted people too. To me, he will always be a recorder of landscapes, both small and large. I look at his portraits and have to look away, discomforted. His eye is too minute, his brush too pointed: it is an intrusion. Instead, as when looking at the sun, one must look indirectly. Behind or to the side, or maybe in the space a subject just walked through, one sees things of which one may not speak: the jagged shadow of a tree stump; the single, lighted window; the plate on a pitted table. We make these things sacred with our breath and our touch, with the tracing of our eye. Wyeth saw the secret life of the things around us—that they hold pieces of ourselves.
I am struck by the wildly divergent tones of the obituaries today. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s: reverent and defensive (as Philly so often is of its own). The Washington Post’s: short and brusque and concentrating on controversy and scandal. The New York Times’: long and authoritative, puffed up self-importantly. The articles catalogue the divisive reviews his work has garnered over the years and show that that which is true of all art is especially true of Wyeth: you get out of his paintings what you bring to them. Many found him sentimental and unsophisticated. In an age of abstract and modernist art, he painted realistically. In an age of cities and machines, he showed a rural life that seemed irrelevant, even dead. His work was loved by the masses, by Middle America, so the critics grouped him with Norman Rockwell, dismissively. Others found him depressing. They looked on his abandoned fields, his weathered farmhouses rendered in sharp lines and whispered colors, and they saw desolation. Once, faced with a commentator who took him to task for his color pallet, Wyeth replied: “Have you seen Chester County in the winter?”
In winter the ground in Chester County is stubbled brown, tan. The corn is gone, but the stalks prickle the eyes. The light is white and flat. The bare grays of trees scratch at a sky that is pale, pale, blue and silvered. The ground curves, gently, and saves us from the gloating shouts of mountain peaks or the existential weight of an endless horizon. Perhaps these others were not here in October, when the sky burnt a turquoise to hot to hold in memory or to capture with a brush. Perhaps they do not bring with them the wisps of last night, of the kitchen table where things were said and not said. Perhaps they do not see the train tracks on the other side of the hill. Perhaps they do not feel how the earth cups you, here under the low clouds. To stand on the edge of a cornfield in winter—bare winter, without the glamour of snow—is, like being in the high desert, a matter of looking inward through the backs of ones own eyeballs. I cannot find this depressing.
Rest in peace, Mr. Wyeth.
I don’t consider myself much of an art person. I studied architecture and literature. For beauty, I prefer textiles and design and household objects to anything made to be hung on a wall. Until today, when I began reading articles on him, I knew little of Wyeth personally or of his ideas about his painting. But because I grew up in Chester County, near Chadds Ford where he lived and worked, Wyeth has always been there on the edges of my consciousness. Most of my memories of his paintings are from early childhood, of being bored, drug along by my parents to “that museum with the pig.” Actually, there are two pigs: a sculpture out back by the river that we got to climb on when we got too antsy, and a giant, bristled pig in a giant, bristled painting that rules over whole galleries of Wyeths (Andrew, Jamie, N.C.). I took these things for granted, as children do.
Chester County is a place as modern and wasted as any other. I grew up in a badly constructed 1960 split-level house. My daily landscape was strip malls and grocery store isles. The Brandywine River Museum, that converted stone barn serving as a temple to the Wyeth family, stands on the edge of the busy and commercial Route 1, barely 100 yards from the passing cars. And yet alongside all this modernity—next too it or behind it or perhaps right on top of it and occupying the same space—is another world to be seen by squinting in the slanting winter light or by turning down that side road, half-hidden in overgrown bushes. This is the world that Andrew Wyeth painted.
There is a cornfield that still stands by my parents’ house; I rode by it every day on my way to school. I would sit by myself on the bus and, just as I knew we had reached the field, would look over my shoulder to follow the stalk-stubble hills as they curved against a gray backdrop of trees. That curve, the trees, the silence: 15 seconds of prayer, although I am not religious. And then as quickly as we got there we were past, and that other world I had slipped into in that moment of looking had disappeared again.
My childhood is full of those moments. Of walking in blank, winter forests. Of spying stone or brick through the flaking whitewash of a wall. Of following tour-guides through the staid halls of an old DuPont mansion, holding my hands behind my back. Of gazing through the rippled glass of a window. Of sitting in a canoe on the Brandywine, looking past the water dripping off my paddle, looking at the power lines dipping, reverent, over the floodplain. All these things simply were. Then, of course, I went away and discovered that the world is a brasher place than I had imagined, where these things do not exist so close to the surface. I discovered too that in the outside world these moments—of being, of mindfulness—are not gifts to be stumbled upon, not a birthright, but must be stolen, willfully, and often with others watching on and waiting for you, impatient. When I realized these things, I turned to Andrew Wyeth, who had lived where I had lived, who had seen what I had seen, and had put onto paper the field and the whitewash and even the power lines, dipping against the sky.
I remember being surprised, as a teenager, to find that Wyeth painted people too. To me, he will always be a recorder of landscapes, both small and large. I look at his portraits and have to look away, discomforted. His eye is too minute, his brush too pointed: it is an intrusion. Instead, as when looking at the sun, one must look indirectly. Behind or to the side, or maybe in the space a subject just walked through, one sees things of which one may not speak: the jagged shadow of a tree stump; the single, lighted window; the plate on a pitted table. We make these things sacred with our breath and our touch, with the tracing of our eye. Wyeth saw the secret life of the things around us—that they hold pieces of ourselves.
I am struck by the wildly divergent tones of the obituaries today. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s: reverent and defensive (as Philly so often is of its own). The Washington Post’s: short and brusque and concentrating on controversy and scandal. The New York Times’: long and authoritative, puffed up self-importantly. The articles catalogue the divisive reviews his work has garnered over the years and show that that which is true of all art is especially true of Wyeth: you get out of his paintings what you bring to them. Many found him sentimental and unsophisticated. In an age of abstract and modernist art, he painted realistically. In an age of cities and machines, he showed a rural life that seemed irrelevant, even dead. His work was loved by the masses, by Middle America, so the critics grouped him with Norman Rockwell, dismissively. Others found him depressing. They looked on his abandoned fields, his weathered farmhouses rendered in sharp lines and whispered colors, and they saw desolation. Once, faced with a commentator who took him to task for his color pallet, Wyeth replied: “Have you seen Chester County in the winter?”
In winter the ground in Chester County is stubbled brown, tan. The corn is gone, but the stalks prickle the eyes. The light is white and flat. The bare grays of trees scratch at a sky that is pale, pale, blue and silvered. The ground curves, gently, and saves us from the gloating shouts of mountain peaks or the existential weight of an endless horizon. Perhaps these others were not here in October, when the sky burnt a turquoise to hot to hold in memory or to capture with a brush. Perhaps they do not bring with them the wisps of last night, of the kitchen table where things were said and not said. Perhaps they do not see the train tracks on the other side of the hill. Perhaps they do not feel how the earth cups you, here under the low clouds. To stand on the edge of a cornfield in winter—bare winter, without the glamour of snow—is, like being in the high desert, a matter of looking inward through the backs of ones own eyeballs. I cannot find this depressing.
Rest in peace, Mr. Wyeth.