Word: fathers
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...idyl ended on an October morning in 1945: N.C. was killed by a train that struck his station wagon in Chadds Ford. Wyeth took his father's death harder than any of the others in the family. Intimations of mortality clouded the clear sky of fantasy. He had never painted his father. Three years after N.C.'s death, Wyeth painted Karl, a stern portrait of his neighbor Karl Kuerner, shown in his attic room. Above Karl's head are two meat hooks, like falcon's claws, thrust down from the ceiling. Says Wyeth: "It was really...
Five years after his father's death, when Wyeth was 33, some bloodstains on his pillow led him to the discovery that he was suffering from bronchiectasis, a disease of the bronchial tubes of one lung. They were removed in an operation so drastic that his chest had to be opened from top to bottom, slashing his shoulder muscles so that he thought he might never be able to paint again. While convalescing, he painted The Trodden Weed, with his arm suspended in a sling from the ceiling. The boots that flatten the weed once belonged to Howard Pyle...
...other son, Jamie, 17. So fast has Jamie learned painting that the proceeds from his work sit in front of the staid Wyeth house like a visitor from Mars-a red-hot Corvette Sting Ray. Says Wyeth, "Some day I'll be known as James Wyeth's father...
...Ever-Subtler Second. From the depiction of high drama as his father taught it, Wyeth has narrowed down to the moments when life is charged with change, swapping N.C.'s clash of cut lasses for his own clap of distant thunder. Sometimes it is only the tragic twinkle of quaker ladies, blossoming while he watches and fading in the frosty dew of early spring. Disciplining the romantic inside him, he has sought the ever-subtler second when existence is galvanized by the unexpected...
...mistake to give even passing mention to a horn-tooting list of favorite achievements, like education reform, tax cuts and the expansion of Medicare. Maybe he was right to pass by the collapse of the economy with less passion than he devoted to the story of the father of a Marine killed in Iraq. He could hardly be accused of making a big deal about nonwar matters when he summed up the current crisis in a single sentence: "These are very tough times for hardworking families, but the toll would be far worse if we had not acted...