Word: tempera
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Useful Yolk. Wyeth's sister Henriette (herself a portraitist) had married Painter Peter Hurd-a fast friend of Andy's. Together Peter and Andy explored the meticulous egg-tempera technique, painting with small brushes on panels, which suits them both perfectly. The technique was standard during the Renaissance, and Wyeth says that "so much hokum has been written about it you feel you have to be a chemist to start on a picture." Wyeth's method is simple: for each day's work he mixes the yolk of one egg with a little distilled water, makes...
...great advantage of egg-tempera is its precision. Thin and fast-drying, it permits none of the slick tricks that oil does, but is fine for detail work and for unobtrusively creating a sense of light. The sky in Wyeth's Young America, for example, has more air than paint about...
While sweating out the weary months in a Rhodesian internment camp he was assigned to decorate the camp church's interior. He did the job in tempera, and claims that he completed a normal two years' work in four months, egged on by two Franciscan friars who kept him well fueled with cognac and whisky. (Pagliacci, a two-fisted drinker, says he does his best painting when slightly tiddly...
...month and a half brushing in each grass blade separately "to make it come toward you, that surge of earth." Perfectionist though he is, Wyeth does not aim to please. The warmth, charm and dazzle of color are foreign to him; so are rhythmic arabesques of line. Using egg tempera and tiny brushes, he paints mostly with dull browns, greys and blacks, composes his pictures to create a deathly sense of stillness and balance rather than of flow...
Within the strict limits he sets himself, Wyeth's carefully wrought tempera paintings almost invariably succeed in being both clear and convincing. Strangely enough, his watercolors, which he dashes off in a hurry, do too. In them his love of nature (preferably bleak) has much freer rein, and in them he proves himself a delicate and sensitive draftsman, not merely a careful...