Andrew Wyeth
Yesterday my wife Alice and I drove up to see the two Andrew Wyeth shows near us at the Brandywine River Museum in Chads Ford, PA and the Somerville Manning Gallery in nearby Greenville, DE. The Brandywine Museum show, Andrew Wyeth in Retrospect , marks the 100th anniversary of Wyeth's birth. Audrey Lewis of the Brandywine Museum co-curated the exhibition, borrowing important Wyeth works from across the country. I was awed by what I saw. Wyeth has a quiet but insistent power to his imagination. He used "traditional" country and farm imagery but always found ways to show us the unexpected. For many viewers Wyeth's ability to render painstakingly detailed surfaces is the big takeaway. And impressive it is. For me though, as a realist painter who eschews minute details, what really struck me throughout the show was Wyeth's masterful sense of design- the way he realized expressive power by leaving things out. The early watercolor Coming Storm ...