Andrew Wyeth

meticulous realism to present the psychological and the abstract.

P36. "Operating in the space between realism and surrealism"

P55. "Wyeth's images are not snapshots of reality but highly composed, carefully arranged personal fictions."

P72. "He began to zoom in on threashods, compressing space, playing with scale, and creating chambers in which windows and door become the focus of attention."

P101." Wyeth does not like rules and he obey none of the conventions of linear perspective:the receeding diagonals of this interior never resolve into a singel vanishing point. Instead, they suggest multiple viewpoints." "telescoping of space."

P85." Emotion" is a key word throughout the commentary on Wyeth's work ."I start every painting with an emotion--something I've just got to get out."

P73.'Maine represented an "intoxiciating freedom", both personally and artistically."

ON WATERCOLOR AND TEMPERA

WATERCOLOR

P93. ""Watercolor is such a wonderful medium,"he said,"You come on something in nature, you're excited, and you can let it out before you begin to think."

P51. " Watercolor allows Wyeth to capture a fleeting feeling or sudden insight that might later become the subject of a major tempera."

TEMPERA

P68. "Because the temprera process involves meticulous layering, he often compares it to building.In his study for weatherside, Wyeth included a flock of barn swallows, but he took them out of the final version because, he explained,"the birds made the picture to momentary to suit me.""

WATER COLOR AND TEMPERA

P94. "In the 1940s, Wyeth began to develop this techinique into a special hybrid, midway between watercolor and tempera." I want to keep the quality of a watercolor done in twenty minutes," he said about his dry brush techinique,"but have all the solidity and texture of a painting."

P53. "Wyeth uses the medium of watercolor and images or thresholds to explore those things that are fleeting, in transition, and ultimately uncontrollable. But he employs the solid medium of tempera, along with images of vessel, to entomb and contain memories, and to attempt to control the uncontrollable."

P.102 "If watercolor is the arena of emotion, these tempera passages are the place of Zen meditation."

ON BEING INVISIBLE

P53.""I wish I could paint without me existing--that just my hands were there,"he once said,"When I'm alone in the woods, across the fields, I forget all about myself, I don't exist." Wyeth does not like people watch him paint:it makes him aware of his physical self and causes him to slip out of his creative trance. For this reason, he dislikes portrait painting:"The person has to be there, watching me. I have to talk.”Wanda Corn argues that this may be the reason so many of his figure turn away from the viewer or appear absorbed in something."

1) People painted as objects:P.24."figure as an animate still life."

2) Objects painted to represent people:If painting 1 model is stressful,painting 2 interacting models would be too much for him, therefore the pair of coats in Quaker . P23."Besides portraying objects as the ghosts of people he knows, Wyeth has concentrated on parts of the body, and even more, on clothing, to represent himself and others." P65. "This process of erasing figures from the composition and relying on objects to tell the story is common in Wyeth's art. As the figures gradually melt away, the objects themselves become intensely real and almost human."

3) Helga: I felt he had painting Helga as a real person instead of an object. He compared Christina to a crab or a wounded gull. Yet P61." Helga has the suggestive aura of a personification, if not a goddess, of nature." Nature is more human than objects.

P74. "He compares his creative state to being in disguise,"inside, looking out, watching--and it's not me people are reacting to. I'm not there.""

P78."To paint this picture, Wyeth would have had to assume an impossible vantage point ,pinned to the rounded ceiling. He has imaginatively become one with the plane."

ON LEAVING THINGS OUT

P33."Wyeth has reflected on the "strange dignity of Hopper's people", and the way Hopper had "stripped everything away till there was nothing, till you are filling nothingness with emotion.He ended up painting a corner of a vacant room and a patch of sun. The whole world in a shaft of light."

P37.""If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.""

P38."As Wyeth explained in an interview published in Times in 1963, his skill in eliminating unnecessary details while retaining the overall mood or theme of a painting was so strong by then that he felt "that he could even have removed Christina from Christina's World and still have conveyed the same sense of loneliness.""