I surrendered to a world of my imagination.

Andrew Wyeth

Stop 2008

Andrew Newell Wyeth (July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) was a visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century and was sometimes referred to as the “Painter of the People,” due to his work’s popularity with the American public.

In his art, Wyeth’s favorite subjects were the land and people around him, both in his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine.

One of the most well-known images in 20th-century American art is his painting, Christina’s World, currently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wyeth

If you clean it up, get analytical, all the subtle joy and emotion you felt in the first place goes flying out the window.

Andrew Wyeth

 

Trodden Weed 1951

Andrew Newell Wyeth (July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) was a visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century and was sometimes referred to as the “Painter of the People,” due to his work’s popularity with the American public.

In his art, Wyeth’s favorite subjects were the land and people around him, both in his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine.

One of the most well-known images in 20th-century American art is his painting, Christina’s World, currently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wyeth

One’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes.

Andrew Wyeth RIP

Christina’s World 1948

Andrew Wyeth, probably the most renowned painter in the United States, died Friday at his home in Chadds Ford, Pa. He was 91.

Mr. Wyeth was the second – following his father N.C. Wyeth, and succeeded by his son, Jamie – in a dynasty of celebrated painters whom most critics belittled as illustrators during an era when the visual arts crackled with experimentation.

Mr. Wyeth preferred to work in tempera, a resistant medium that most of his contemporaries regarded as obsolete. Its sensuous asperity suited his largely sunless vision of rural American vistas and characters tattered by time and isolation.

The extreme popularity, and the ready reproducibility, of some of Mr. Wyeth’s paintings, particularly “Christina’s World” (1948), kept public curiosity about the artist, which he ignored, at a simmer throughout his career.

In 1988, the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, in its now-demolished old building, hosted the widely circulated exhibition, “Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures.” It featured dozens of portraits, including many nudes, of a favorite model that Mr. Wyeth had reputedly kept secret from his wife.

The insinuation of infidelity about “The Helga Pictures,” combined with admiration of Mr. Wyeth’s obvious technical skills, caused the exhibition to attract huge crowds at all of its venues.

So did the purchase by collector Leonard E.B. Andrews, before the show began its tour, of the nearly 250 works in the complete Helga series for an undisclosed sum rumored to be between $6 million and $10 million. Some commentators even raised suspicions that the collector might have conspired with the artist to inflate the value of the works, following their purchase, by inflating the lore of their clandestine production. Andrews later sold the cache abroad for a reputed $40 million.

Again, critics generally disdained the Helga portraits and their surrounding hoopla as a triumph of promotion over artistry. Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times nearly lost his job for writing a caustic pan of the Helga exhibition and Mr. Wyeth, which he ended by admitting that he had not seen the show and had no intention of doing so.

In 1998, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York presented “Unknown Terrain: The Landscapes of Andrew Wyeth,” which came closer than any other exhibition to remaking Mr. Wyeth’s reputation among critics. Again, acclaim was far from unanimous, but critics with some technical appreciation of watercolor recognized true mastery, and at times even a modernist eye for composition, in the landscapes the show surveyed.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco own three superb examples of Wyeth’s watercolor work, although none are currently on display.

But the last substantial show of Mr. Wyeth’s work, “Andrew Wyeth: Magic and Memory” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2006, may have come closest to representing his own estimation of his achievement. He and his family helped to select, and in some cases loaned, the work included.

Tempera paintings predominated in the Philadelphia show, with a strong and persuasive emphasis on portraits. Aspects of mood, narrative and symbolism also prevailed, despite the inclusion of a few formally audacious works on paper.

But the Philadelphia retrospective left the impression of an artist proudly committed to anachronism.

Mr. Wyeth, born on July 12, 1917, the youngest of five children, received formal training only from his father.

N.C. (for Newell Convers) Wyeth had become famous as an illustrator of popular literary classics well before his son’s apprenticeship in his studio, which lasted only two years. Because of a respiratory ailment, Andrew Wyeth had been educated at home, so the transition to his father’s tutelage was natural, and eased by Mr. Wyeth’s native drawing talent.

Mr. Wyeth’s first New York gallery show in 1936 brought immediate success, but he claimed to have taken his own artistic potential seriously only after the accidental death of his father, his chief inspiration, in 1945. Mr. Wyeth claimed to recognize his father’s expansive spirit in the Pennsylvania landscape that so many of his pictures describe.

From his older brother-in-law, Peter Hurd, another prominent illustrator, Mr. Wyeth learned the labor-intensive technique of painting in egg tempera. Through it, he felt a connection to the Northern Renaissance masters, such as Albrecht Dürer, the realist painters he most admired.

Mr. Wyeth’s wife of nearly 68 years, Betsy, successfully managed the business of his career for decades. They divided their time between homes in Chadds Ford and in Maine. Neighbors in both states, including Christina Olson of “Christina’s World” and Helga Testorf, made their way into Mr. Wyeth’s pictures.

Mr. Wyeth received many honors besides popular recognition and major museum exhibitions. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received the Gold Medal of Honor from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/16/MNPL15BSVL.DTL

Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art. It is important to forget about what you are doing..then a work of art may happen.

Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth was born July 12, 1917 in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. He was the youngest of five children. Andrew was a sickly child and so his mother and father made the decision to pull him out of school after he contracted whooping cough. His parents home-schooled him in every subject including art education.

Newell Convers Wyeth (Andrew’s father) was a well known illustrator whose art was featured in many magazines, calendars, posters and murals. He even painted maps for the National Geographic Society.

Painting Style
Andrew had a vivid memory and fantastic imagination that led to a great fascination for art. His father recognized an obvious raw talent that had to be nurtured. While his father was teaching him the basics of traditional academic drawing Andrew began painting watercolour studies of the rocky coast and the sea in Port Clyde Maine.

He worked primarily in watercolours and egg tempera and often used shades of brown and grey. He held his first one-man show of watercolours painted around the family’s summer home at Port Clyde, Maine in 1937. It was a great success that would lead to plenty more.

Successes
He married at the age of twenty-two to a local girl named Betsey James and had two boys, Nicholas who became an art dealer, and James who became the third generation artist in his family. Interestingly, although James’ father was the most popular artist in his family history, he was greatly inspired by his grandfather’s illustrations.

He was featured on the cover of American Artist as well as many other famous magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post that displayed his painting “The Hunter.” His first solo museum exhibition was presented in 1951 at the Farnsworth Art Museum. Since then he has seen many more successes and is considered one of the most “collectable” living artist’s of our time.

 http://www.andrew-wyeth-prints.com/biography.html