Andrew Wyeth: Portrait of Genius

When you come back to a place as an adult where you'd lived as a child, it always looks and feels different than you remember. Distances that once seemed to take forever to drive don't seem so long. A sledding hill that through a child's eyes seemed gargantuan now looks like many other hills you've seen. Everything looks different through adult eyes.

Even through the jaded eyes of an adult, a few things always keep their significance. Your childhood home. A favorite market. Streams and woods. These treasured places live on in our memories as if the past were a dream from which you cannot wake up.

The paintings of Andrew Wyeth evoke for many that dream life within us all, the feeling that some places--and people--are more important than others.

Andrew Wyeth was sometimes criticized for his focus on subjects that were homey or, by contrast, overly dramatic in their down to earth rendition of seemingly sad, lonely people. But Wyeth was first and foremost a painter of portent. That is, he painted what mattered to him and demanded, through virtuosity in paint and composition, that we consider why. Within the veneer of Wyeth's subject matter lay a deep respect for a tradition known as realism. Yet Wyeth also broke through those traditions to create art that said you could use the mundane to communicate the meaningful.

In that respect Wyeth was radical in some respects. He joined a slipstream of painters who move through the ocean of the art world like a current that cannot be redirected or denied. So powerful a pull did Wyeth have that countless artists were influenced by his work, often without knowing it.

I recall that as a college freshman art student I selected Wyeth as a subject to study. My instructor found the choice a bit odd, I guess. "He's sort of an illustrator," I recall him observing about Wyeth. "No, he's not," I said in a bout of precocious collegiate fury. Then I set about to prove my art instructor wrong.

It was a difficult assignment. It is not easy to penetrate Wyeth's work to get at the keen rendering style of his drawings and paintings. The few sources available on Wyeth's work at the time were giant format reproductions of paintings like "Christina's World." A young artist could not hope to replicate the power and simplicity of that composition, nor hope to grasp the incredibly honest ability to draw that woman's body and form in its compromised proportions.

Instead I locked in on a single drawing, a pencil sketch of a young boy. The line and shading in that pencil drawing represented everything I wanted to achieve at that point in my art career. There is nothing so difficult as economy in rendering the human form, especially the face of a youth. Yet here Andrew Wyeth excelled. Everything in that pencil sketch was worth emulating. The thick and thin changes in line. The patient gravity of the shading. The confidence to not overwork the drawing at all.

My art professor got the message. I'd seen something in Wyeth that spoke to the creation of art. Many people have enjoyed Andrew Wyeth's work for its symbolism and emotion. But those who take the time to consider how he was able to create his work are delivered a special treat.

As a painter the most daunting aspects of Wyeth's work are his ability to use positive and negative space to create tension and weight in his work. If you are not an artist, here is a short explanation of that principle. Positive space is usually characterized as the main subject while negative space is composed of the objects, or lack thereof, around the main subject.

When we consider a painting such as "Wolf Moon" by Andrew Wyeth (see links associated with this article) we find absolute mastery in the artist's ability to balance absolute opposites to create mood. The painting captures a house (the Kuerner residence) at night. Alone, that subject is difficult to execute. But then, Wyeth throws moonlight into the equation, countered by the dim golden glow of a lamp barely visible in a window slat. There are enormous flanks of snow wrapping the exterior landscape. Either a midwinter thaw or the first melt of spring has begun. Either way, the world outside the house looks raw and intemperate. The significance here is the rendering of internal (the mind) and external (the world) space. Wolf Moon shows us how very small we really are in the world. Our homes are our refuge, yet the terrible beauty of the world at large beckons and threatens at the same time.

What really stops other artists short in trying to execute paintings like these is Wyeth's ability to create "believeable" darks and lights with his paints. The Wyeth shadow is a deep and foreboding shadow. How he was able to paint such deep darks without falling into flat black I may never understand. This is the artistic genius of Andrew Wyeth.

His darks sometimes created feelings of warmth and security as well, such as the shade beneath a pine tree in Maine. Here are spaces that a child could explore. Only Wyeth it seems (at times) pays significant attention to this emotional world.

That is why Andrew Wyeth is so often, and perhaps poorly, imitated. Many artists go out and paint old barns. Their paintings may be lovely in some ways but they lack the bearing and grace of a work by Wyeth. I know this well, having painted (blandly) a few old barns myself.

When Wyeth ultimately broke out of his own mold to exhibit a group of paintings featuring solid young women in the nude, many people knew not what to make of them. These paintings were fresh and candid, yet heavy in their renditions of the female figure. On one hand they held a longing and admiration for the female form. On the other hand they just let it go. The eye was free to wander the rest of the painting. This was not lust at work, but desire. The two are often very different. One concludes with a carnal thud while the other invites the music of the soul.

Leave it to Andrew Wyeth to turn even nudes into a cryptic question. His work never relented in the pursuit of ideas wrapped in painted form.

There will never be another painter like Andrew Wyeth. He was original in his character and work. His son Jamie is brilliant in his own regard, but no imitator of his father, just as Andrew Wyeth did not imitate his father N.C. Wyeth. This is a family of artists that has given much to the American landscape, both in art, and in direct reality. Their paintings are a gift back to America. It is ours to appreciate the gift we have been given.