Wyeth

WHAT DO YOU SEE?

"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."

Andrew Wyeth - American Painter - 1917-2009

"Art critics mostly heaped abuse on his work, saying he gave realism a bad name. Supporters said he spoke to the silent majority who jammed his exhibitions. “In today’s scrambled-egg school of art, Wyeth stands out as a wild-eyed radical,” one journalist wrote in 1963, speaking for the masses. “For the people he paints wear their noses in the usual place, and the weathered barns and bare-limbed trees in his starkly simple landscapes are more real than reality.”" - NYT see link below...

I love this man's wonderfully weathered face in this photo printed in the New York Times. I also deeply respect his approach to nature. He looked on it as it was and saw through any clouded belief about how it should be. He interpreted what was there and put no judgement upon it. What a skill.

I am forever looking at the landscape and judging it, maybe that is the designer training that has veiled my ability to just see. My practice for this winter is going to be to look at the landscape and take it in for what it is.

Of course at some point I will want to change it, improve it, update it or just pretty it up...I can't help it. But I believe that if I study what nature is doing a little more closely, the way a painter might, maybe I will get some of the most precious and valuable design tips ever.

Happy Gardening

Above NYT quote from...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/17/arts/design/17wyeth.html

New York Times article - Andrew Wyeth, Painter, Dies at 91

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: January 16, 2009