Creativity Central [Marty Baker]

 Andrew Wyeth died in his sleep on his estate in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania at the age of 91.  His death, like many of his paintings, happened in the empty cold and the crisp sunlight of winter.  While I have many favorite painters from Caravaggio to Edward Hopper, Wyeth was my favorite.

But even in death, there was criticism.  He was painted by the critics as too populist, too realistic, too obvious a craftsman than a thinker.  In my childhood home, there were only two works of art hanging on the walls. In the kitchen, there was an illustration of a wagon filled with pots and pans and virtually any circa 1900 item you could imagine.  The caption read, “You can’t do business with an empty wagon.”  My parents weren’t business people, so the reasons for hoisting this on the wall are forever lost to their memory.

The second painting was Wyeth’s Christina’s World.  It is Wyeth’s most iconic piece and it lives in the Museum of Modern Art.  For years, I only saw a beautiful woman in a faded pink dress lying in the grass gazing at a house on a hill.  I remember the faint tire tracks leading to the house and curved line that delineated the mowed area of the property. 

My mother once asked me to look closer at Christina.  I noticed her arm was oddly shaped and my mother told me that Christina was cripple and that the moment captured was the struggle of Wyeth’s polio-stricken neighbor crawling toward home. I discovered years later that Wyeth painted it indoors from memory and his sketches.  The “Christina” from this painting was a combination of the real Christina and Wyeth’s wife Betsy.

A few years ago, I walked along a winding road next to Kuerner’s Farm. A place where Wyeth created over 1,000 works of art – drawing and painting the buildings, the people, the animals and the landscape.  I looked at the barn and noticed that it had four windows.  In one of Wyeth’s paintings of the barn, I saw only a single lit widow.

It is a small abstraction, but I think it reveals the essence of Wyeth’s creativity.  His paintings weren’t merely photographs in egg tempera on panel, but a kind of impressionism that was uniquely his. His learned his craft from his famous father, N.C., his aunt and a friend of the family, Peter Hurd.

He was the youngest of a very talented family and always retained a kind of impish, child-like joy of discovering the subtle details that resonated with his artistic sensibilities.  Peter Hurd taught him the painstaking technique of egg tempera -- a medium that requires layers of cross-hatching to create colors and tones. 

Wyeth inspired me to take up painting at age of 40. I was able to push an ounce of talent into a gallery show and I sold four paintings.  And for that, I am grateful.  Through his paintings, I learned how to see.  I learned how to tell a story from Edward Hopper.  And I learned how to embrace my imagination through Picasso and Matisse.  

Wyeth also taught me that painting is among the most intimate of the arts.  Every painting is a filter of someone’s perception and a brief look into their heart.  Andrew Wyeth had a tremendous heart and we are all the better for it.