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FeedWyeth's World
Main Line Today's Catherine Quillman reflects on the artist's life as she came to know it.
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As a former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, Main Line Today contributor Catherine Quillman covered the arts and culture in the Brandywine Valley. Her career included interviews with the Wyeth family and a cast of Andrew Wyeth’s intimates, from the models for his work to his biographer, to the former caretaker of the family homestead. These conversations were bookended by two interviews with Wyeth himself, in 1993 and 2006. Below is her reflection.
I heard about Andrew Wyeth’s death in the early morning when I was awakened by a voice on my answering machine telling me that he had “passed on.” The message was from a friend of a friend whose late mother had worked as Wyeth's housekeeper for over 30 years. I bring up that connection only because Wyeth seemed to inspire Chester County’s own version of the “six degrees of separation.” I don’t have to read every entry of the Brandywine River Museum’s remembrance blog to know that there was something about Wyeth that made us want to come forward and share every anecdote about him.
Wyeth certainly was not your run-of-the-mill celebrity artist, but neither was he an artist who could call his admirers “his collectors” or his fan base. His unusually close relationship with the locals and regular folk was due, perhaps, to the fact that he was the only American artist to have painted entirely in two places: Chadds Ford and around his summer home in Maine.
It made sense that his favorite writers included Robert Frost, who spoke of neighborly divisions (“He is all pine and I am apple orchard”), and Thoreau, who wryly wrote, “I have traveled much in Concord.”
To paraphrase artist Karl Kuerner, whose family farm is now open to the public, Wyeth captured a small corner of our world and made us appreciate its qualities. What makes his death particularly poignant (“The end of an era,” Kuerner says.) is that Wyeth was still painting nearly right up to the end. His death marks the end of a vision that evolved and changed, but kept true to his belief that he could only paint what he knew and loved. Chadds Ford is no longer the “little village with the dirt road running through it,” as he once said, but Wyeth faced change with his characteristic good cheer. Paintings of recent years, I've noticed, have included images of yellow yield signs, red traffic cones, the white streaming headlights of Route 1 at night, and even a dead squirrel.
I'm not suggesting that Wyeth was one for commentary—only that he was an artist who observed the times. He was our historian of sorts, capturing those places like the Kuerner Farm and the black community of Mother Archie’s Church before the way of life they represent disappeared forever.
Wyeth never taught nor even gave a local lecture in an informal setting. Yet nearly every artist I know has defined themselves as being with or outside the Wyeth tradition. A handful have even moved great distances to be near Wyeth. Others were aspiring local artists who learned first-hand that their famous neighbor was happy to share his artistic terrain. Those who come to mind are Kuerner, who studied with Wyeth’s sister, Carolyn, as well as the late Jimmy Lynch and Rea Redifer.
Redifer, who died last May at age 75, went so far as to trace his entire painting career back to a chance encounter he had while serving in the Korean War. On leave in Japan, he happened to see an exhibit of Wyeth’s paintings and decided on the spot to move to Chadds Ford and beg “Andy” for lessons.
The discovery that Wyeth would no sooner take up acrylic painting than consider teaching was often a minor point, my informants tell me. The exchange typically went something like this: After a ribbing and a “hee, hee” laugh from Andy, his eyes becoming half moons like Christmas cheer personified, the prospective student was quickly dispensed to the old N.C. Wyeth Studio, where Carolyn coolly gave you the once over in a cloud of cigarette smoke and decided if you were up to the task of becoming an artist.
