Say what you will about Andrew Wyeth, he introduced at least one ten-year-old to seriously looking at art. At my request, my parents framed a print of Wyeth's "Faraway" and it hung over my bed for many years. Today I am more intrigued and moved by Wyeth's watercolors than his every-brown-blade-of-grass realism, but who knows—without that accessible and yet mysterious painting, I might not have started noticing what artists like Wyeth made of our world. RIP.

re: art, childhood, painting

Andy

:

I suspect that once the shouting dies down, Wyeth’s oeuvre will undergo at least a partial revaluation, and that it will center on his watercolors. Like so many other American artists who came to prominence between the end of the 19th century and the emergence of Abstract Expressionism, Wyeth profited greatly from the immediacy of watercolor, an on-the-spot medium that does not allow for second thoughts: What you paint is what you get. It forced him to be free. To look at a watercolor like “Benjamin’s House,” which hangs in San Francisco’s de Young Museum, is to see what Wyeth meant when he claimed that “I honestly consider myself to be an abstractionist.” All narrative content has been stripped out of this bare, washy winter scene, leaving only the essentials: a wall, a window, a handful of branches. The result is a masterly little glimpse of the visible world, executed with self-effacing virtuosity.