Word: painterly
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Reading the obituaries of painter Andrew Wyeth after his death last Friday, I had a crisis of confidence...
...comparisons between Wyeth and other regionalist/realists of the period—Winslow Homer, Norman Rockwell—the best is to Edward Hopper. As the abstract painter Mark Rothko put it, “Wyeth is about the pursuit of strangeness, but he is not whole, as Hopper is whole.” I can accept that Wyeth is perhaps not the best of his contemporaries. But that they passed him by entirely? Never...
...gathers until there are often 20 at table. Betsy cooks up a storm straight out of the Gourmet Cookbook, and-though she might still chill them-there are vintage French burgundies to add some thunder. A frequent visitor over the years is Brother-in-Law Hurd, a New Mexico painter of Western landscapes, who years ago taught Wyeth how to paint with tempera. Together, though, they are more apt to top each other's tall tales than talk...
This line of investigation makes his New York contemporaries view Wyeth as a country cousin. To Larry Rivers, "He's like someone who writes marvelous sonnets, but I don't read sonnets much." To Jack Levine, he is "a symbol of real, real bedrock Americanismo." Painter Robert Motherwell, formerly an art historian, says: "I would imagine that an impressionist would have looked at the pre-Raphaelites with astonishment, and I feel a parallel astonishment regarding the works of Wyeth." But they all look carefully at what Wyeth does, and agree that there is something uncanny, macabre and mysterious...
...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...