Andrew Wyeth

“If I was really good, I could have done the field in ‘Christina’s World’ without her in it. The less you have in a picture, the better it is.” --Andrew Wyeth.

Our local art museum has a show of three generations of Wyeths, and I woke this morning from a dream that I was talking to Jamie Wyeth, the youngest of the three painters, about his father Andrew’s work. I don’t know the Wyeths or anyone who knows them, but my dream must have been prompted by my unconscious awareness that the show was in town. Sue felt up to a brief outing, so we had a look. 

It is the work of Andrew (the middle generation) that draws me--his quiet neutrals, his textures, and most of all his stark, even bleak landscapes. The museum is showing a looping video interview with Andrew Wyeth that includes the quote I am posting above, and the reason I’m blipping this detail from one of the paintings is that I think his observation about painting can apply equally to landscape photography. The less you have in a picture, the better it is. Of course it’s easier to have less in a picture if you live in an old house in an unpopulated stretch of Maine (or the Hebrides for that matter) than if you live in the middle of a city, but I am yearning for more emptiness and silence. My favorite landscape photograph of those I took in 2017 is one that could be a Wyeth painting and even includes the view out a window, as many of his do. I took it in February at the beach (Extra).