Word: drybrush
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Scratches at the Mask. Wyeth paints a timeless natural world, probing past the facades of nature, where some people only see picnic sites, to a further reality behind. He has sketched countless pencil studies of tiny seed pods as fragilely faceted as snowflakes, made exquisite drybrush watercolors* of bees' honeycombs in winter. Thus he scratches at the mask of nature, attempts by imitation to expose her identity. For Wyeth well knows now one poignant tragedy of man: that he can never know all his world before it vanishes from his sight...
...Toledo Museum of Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia; William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum in Rockland, Me.; Shelburne (Vt.) Museum; New Britain (Conn.) Museum of American Art; Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn.; and Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, N.H. * Drybrush, used by Wyeth's mentor of the miniature, Albrecht Dürer, as early as 1450, is more like drawing than watercoloring in technique. The artist works over still wet washes of water-soluble pigment with a brush dipped in concentrated color and squeezed almost dry. The stiff bristles...
...detail that would be utterly fascinating with a greater artist -- a Manet, a Degas or even a Winslow Homer -- but that at Wyeth's level of achievement seems almost tiresome. The bulk of the show is pencil sketches and watercolors, grouped around a dozen or so finished images in drybrush and tempera. To study an artist's sketches is to go behind the scenes of his talent, to see how the mechanisms of his pictorial thought work; one sees each twist in the evolution of form and idea. But the interest of such a spectacle depends on the extent...
...some scoop. For 15 years, from 1970 to 1985, Wyeth had labored in secret on an enormous collection of works: 246 in all, including sketches, studies, drawings, 32 watercolors, twelve drybrush paintings and five temperas. Not even his wife was aware of the magnitude of the undertaking. Moreover, almost all of them were of a middle-aged German whom Wyeth identified only as Helga and who lived near the Wyeths' winter home in Chadds Ford, Pa. Artist and model met in various places over the years, and the resulting works, many of them nudes, are streaked with an intensity both...
...totem placed on its side. But no: there is a hint of life and movement. Helga's hip has curled out of its confining sheet, perhaps in response to the sound of the cascade outside her window that gives the work its title. Following the gestation from sketch to drybrush is like flipping through a family album of Atget X rays...