Andrew Wyeth

1917
US

Andrew Wyeth, born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, is the son of the talented illustrator N. C. Wyeth. Fragile as a child, young Wyeth received his art training from his father, who taught him the precision of line and accuracy of drawing that make his work technically excellent. His color is always subdued-often subtly monochromatic.

His earliest work, done in 1929 when he was twelve, is pen and ink, precise and delicate in line, elegant in style in the best tradition of illustration. Wyeth then turned to the use of pencil and colored washes, then to watercolor drawings. At the age of sixteen, influenced by Winslow Homer, he was creating bold impressions of light, tone, and movement. Wyeth then disciplined his natural talent in order to present "the truth of the object."

To achieve his aim, he experimented with various media, finally settling on "drybrush" watercolor and egg tempera painting, learning the latter technique from his brother-in-law Peter Hurd. These media require both time and patience, and Wyeth did not choose them lightly. A finished painting is often the result of many months of work.

Final selection of a treatment is frequently accomplished only after many pen-and-ink drawings have been done of his subjects. Wyeth chooses his landscape subjects from two areas, Chadd's Ford and Cushing, Maine, the places he loves best and in which he personally is most deeply involved. He paints also the people he knows well.

He does not, however, paint as if he were using a camera, but brings to his work the artist's extreme sensitivity, the painter's eye, and the poet's ability to transcend the moment, to synthesize an entire series of impressions into a crystallization of associated ideas that goes far beyond simple realism.