Andrew Wyeth is one of the most beloved and, at the same time, one of the most underrated American artists of the 20th century. All his paintings exude an atmosphere of loneliness, longing, and melancholy. Essentially, he would sit on his porch or inside his house and paint everything around him.
In “Christina’s World,” a painting where a girl is semi-lying in a field, this girl is Wyeth’s neighbor Anna Christina Olson, partially paralyzed by CMT disease. Despite her physical limitations, Christina led an active life on the farm, helping with chores and taking care of the house. The painting symbolizes human resilience and the pursuit of goals despite difficulties.
Andrew Wyeth’s father, Newell Convers (N. C.) Wyeth, was a renowned illustrator and artist. The family was generally quite creative (his father, grandfather, and two aunts were artists), making it difficult for Andrew to avoid the fate of becoming an artist himself. 🙂 He was taught art by his father from an early age, and they were very close. When Wyeth was 28, his father died under the wheels of a train, and since then, the melancholy in Wyeth’s paintings has only increased.
His father made him draw from plaster casts and Rimmer’s Anatomy, teaching him to study the model, then turn his back on it and draw from memory. It’s actually a very interesting approach. I always thought that foreign languages should be learned in the same way. Read or heard a text—turned your back on it and recited it. A lot of information goes in one ear and out the other, and what enters through the eyes often goes somewhere deep and gets buried. Separating the important from the unimportant and being able to reproduce knowledge is a very important skill. This is partly why I write a lot on Facebook and the Hybrismart blog, because it’s a way to remember and understand things better.
I remind you that similar posts are grouped under the tag #artrauflikes, and on beinginamerica.com in the “Art Rauf Likes” section, there are all 63 (currently) of them (unlike Facebook, which forgets (ignores) almost half).
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 