Really enjoyed this retrospective on Andrew Wyeth [Amazon Prime link below] - it gives new depth and insight into his works. Here are a few excerpts:
Christina's World
1:00 There something very odd about his paintings in that all the air is sucked out. There is no atmosphere. If you think of Christina's World and the little house away in the distance, in real life that would be foggy...blurry...[the pristine clarity] gives you a sense of strange isolation.
Karl's room, Kuerner's
1:01 He liked to turn his paintings upside down, and judge the composition, and if it didn't [retain] the sense of composition then it wasn't yet a great painting.
Groundhog day
1:04: "the strange story of the dog...the log outside with that [impression] of fangs [on its jagged cut edge] became that dog so I could eliminate the dog... There's this scary log outside the window...That sense of violence... is part of the restlessness in this painting...in one sense this painting is so serene, and yet at the same time there are these unsettling aspects that can't really be explained, and they're part of that distillation of how he came to make this image."
Thin Ice
1:05 the qualities that Wyeth possesses, and the way he perceived life and death - his essence - may actually be closer to the Japanese sensibility... In Japan, there is a line in the famous classic Hojoki, " The flow of the river is incessant, and yet the water is never the same." Meaning all things are constantly changing and transient... The kind of esthetic they honor in they're artists... He sits quietly with nature...in the constant change there is beauty to be enjoyed.
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