Andrew Wyeth, Braids, Tempura, 1979
Andrew Wyeth has died at the ripe old age of 91. He was a popular and very successful painter which brought him as much criticism as it did fame. His detractors accused him of only being an illustrator and too commercially successful, therefore not a real artist. I personally enjoy his paintings for their detail, texture and empathy for the subject and think it’s a bum rap that true artists have to eat crayons like Van Gogh to get any props
Below are some quotes, because although he was a secretive man (Helga paintings not discovered till 1986, never seen by his wife?) he really liked to talk:
“When people want to bring sex into these images, OK, let ‘em,” … “The heart of the Helga series is that I was trying to unlock my emotions in capturing her essence, in getting her humanity down”
“I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future — the timelessness of the rocks and the hills — all the people who have existed there,” he once said. “I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape — the loneliness of it — the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.
“I think anything like that — which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone — people always feel is sad. Is it because we’ve lost the art of being alone?”
I thought he had already dead. I guess I was thinking when the Helga series made the news way back when it was because he had passed on. The detail in his work was impressive.