More on the Wyeths and Wanting to Create What Does Not Come Naturally
There were three artists in the Wyeth family. The first was N.C. (Newell Convers) Wyeth, the second, Andrew Wyeth, and the third, James Wyeth who is the only one still living.
N.C. Wyeth illustration from Treasure Island
N.C. was very famous in his time and is still well known for his powerful, dramatic, operatic illustrations of adventure books and stories. His figures are heroic in proportions and always give the appearance of at least having a potential for violence. Solidly but simply constructed, they are made with little detail, yet the thick use of paint simulates the busy textures of nature, contributing to the dynamic quality of his work.
Andrew Wyeth was one of the best known artists in the country and is still well known for his quiet, austere, haunting images of people and scenes normally overlooked in the general scheme of life. (See http://www.andrewwyeth.com/index.html) His paintings are contemplative and they often have a sense of timelessness which is alternately unsettling and comforting. This effect was accomplished by a delicate balance between highly rendered details and compositional simplicity and by using form as means of creating subtle lighting effects that in turn created their special moods.
N.C. died with his grandson in a car-train accident. There has been speculation that the death was suicide possibly because of a bi-polar condition and ongoing angst over his unfulfilled attempts at bringing his work to a higher level.
Andrew Wyeth seemed to pity his father’s loss of faith in his own natural talents and for his attempts at creating work that was opposite that nature. But Ironically Andrew made the same mistake in reverse. N.C. dismissed the unique power in his dramatic illustrations and tried to create work that expressed the infinite and universal in the small and mundane aspects of life. In a similar manner Andrew gave less credence to the quiet timelessness in his paintings and more to a powerful force that he preferred to believe was emanating from them.
I think both men were more honest with themselves when they were young than when they were in their later years—truer to themselves before they began to judge themselves against all they admired in life, and in each other.
When N.C. was a young illustrator and doing research for illustrations on the western plains of the U.S. he wrote home about how life there “clutches me like some unseen animal.” Later in his life he wrote “The significance of a tiny speck of bark on the pine tree assumes the proportions of the infinite sky”—words that better describe his son’s work than his own.
Andrew said, by way of describing Rembrandt’s paintings, “His people turn toward the light. but it’s frozen motion; time is holding its breath for an instant—for an eternity. That’s what I’m after.” But later, when the quality of his work had declined he spoke as if his paintings were charged with heightened emotions, using words like anger and intensity, which better describe his father’s work.
The loss of self is not unusual among artists. A consciousness of self expression is a relatively new requirement in the history of art and is, I think, one of the primary difficulties for artists today. Until the19th century it was a secondary concern. Finding one’s self and creating an effective means of expression that meets the present sense of art’s function is often a mirage-like experience. The more deliberate we are about it the more it seems to slip away form us. That is the most difficult lesson to learn in creating art and the most difficult puzzle to solve.
