Word: wyeth
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...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...
...give me goose pimples," he says. His flesh crawls at odd moments. In Wind from the Sea Wyeth opens an upstairs window in Christina Olson's house in a room that has been closed for years, and the billowing of lace curtains lets in a sudden puff of salty air. Wyeth is moved. Abruptly glimpsing his own reflection in a dusty mirror leads to an unexpected 1949 self-portrait, The Revenant, where he stands perplexed and unbalanced in an abandoned room. The amber glass ball on a lightning rod in Northern Point looks to him "as if it were...
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...
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...
...some, a man who bothers to paint a blade of grass is an anachronism who must have been born in the previous century. The late Bernard Berenson, going on guesswork, believed that Wyeth was dead ("What a pity America has starved its painters," he murmured). No foreign museums or collectors have ever bought his work...