Word: abstraction
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...thrust Sipson into the frontline of the epic fight between economic development and environmental concerns, which is intensifying as the global economy stutters. Across the world, politicians are asking themselves how best to balance their green agendas against their struggles to stimulate growth. Such questions are anything but abstract for Sipson's elderly residents, many of whom have spent their entire lives in the village. "I got married in the local church. My children were born here. Our family home is here," says Linda McCutcheon, a 63-year old pensioner who has lived in the village for 42 years...
Andrew Wyeth of Chadds Ford, Pa. (pop. 140), and Cushing, Me. (pop. 130), stands high and apart from the mainstream of American art. Manhattan-centered abstract expressionism has in the past two decades given a multitude of new answers to the central questions: What is painting? What is art? What is form? Wyeth is no heroic rearguard defender against that trend. But, in a tradition going back to Rembrandt and to the roots of art, he insists on exploring something else: the condition of nature and the depth of the human spirit...
...crooked hip joints, which give him a gangly gait. Instead, at a time when U.S. art was at a virtual standstill, he churned out vigorous, splashy watercolors that explored flattened space, joyous color and jumpy line in such a way that they could have marked him as a nascent abstract expressionist...
...foreigners recognize his existence, although the abstract expressionists are well known abroad, and even the Pop artists have attained some vogue. When Bernard Dorival, director of Paris' Museum of Modern Art, was asked about Wyeth, he replied, "Who? But perhaps we pronounce his name differently here." Wyeth returns the compliment. He has never felt the need to go to Europe-or, for that matter, to much of anywhere else that is very far from Chadds Ford or Cushing...
Wyeth feels that if he wants to find exotic things, he need only explore a couple of miles beyond the gas station at the Chadds Ford crossroads. But if he does not first learn his own small world to the last detail, how will he abstract the vibrancy and vitality from it, how will he record the unexpected, the out-of-kilter, the sudden clap of distant thunder? So he has chosen to follow the advice of Poet-Painter William Blake and see a world in a grain of sand...