Andrew Wyeth, November First

“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”

-Andrew Wyeth

What hidden “stories” wait beneath the winter and autumn landscapes Andrew Wyeth loved to paint?

Wyeth’s watercolor November First takes tattered cornstalks swaying in the wind and subtly raises them to the level of visual poetry. A close reading of November First can yield some clues as to how that happens and why it’s a great painting.

It’s not the subject – it’s the subject combined with the way Wyeth paints it that raises this painting beyond merely descriptive landscape. Starting with the composition, the way Wyeth positions the viewer at such a low level below the subject diminishes the human element from the start.

The hill’s rise and tilt to one side leaves us staring up at the sharp-edged barbs and spears of the stalks against a bright patch of sky drained of color. Here is where we find the painting’s darkest darks and the starkest contrasts. There’s nothing much else to hold onto – the scene is devoid of any hint of shelter or other manmade elements.

Wyeth left quite a bit of raw, rough-edged patches and lines throughout his brushwork. Of course, he was capable of the most photo-like realism, but here the paint-handling expresses

The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, which owns the painting, notes this cornfield was located near Wyeth’s studio in Chadds Ford, PA, behind the house of Dr. Margaret Handy, the pediatrician who cared for Wyeth’s two children. The location in this case is worth mentioning; it’s not hard to imagine Wyeth, worried about his kids, side-eyeing the withered stalks scratching against each other in the wind.

You can’t help, even if only on an unconscious level, to anthropomorphize and translate those cornstalks into figures. If those were people coming over the crest of that hill, what kind of people and what shape do you suppose they’d be in? I think they’d be desperate, lost maybe, clothed in rags, struggling to survive, soldiers perhaps, or refugees.

The contrasts and the constricted palette contribute to that “whole story” – something to do with the inevitable cycles of decay and renewal – that’s never fully told. We all know it though, that feeling of time passing, mortality and new life intertwining, something a parent might feel for a second or two walking a sick child to the family doctor’s door.

If you’re interested in painting winter landscapes in watercolor, you might want to follow along with master painter Sterling Edwards in his video Brushwork Techniques for Expressive Watercolor, in which Sterling focuses on improving your brushwork and getting feeling into a snowy landscape. Watch a four-minute preview here.

And now for something completely different…

Art that Asks the Big Questions – and also says Hug Me!

Claude Cormier, Stuffed Animals, 2012, 3,000 stuffed animals, wood

Canadian artist Claude Cormier makes “paintings” with stuffed animals. From across the room, Cormier’s work Stuffed Animals at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art reads like a colorful abstraction. Get closer and you realize it’s plushies – 3,000 of them to be precise.

As the artist points out: “Hundreds of stuffed animals lovingly stare out at us. In t5he incredible hustle and bustle that colors our all-too-brief lives, we crazy little creatures all ask ourselves the same eternal questions, the one so dear to Gaugin: ‘Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?’