From the NYT: "Andrew Wyeth, one of the most popular and also most lambasted artists in the history of American art, a reclusive linchpin in a colorful family dynasty of artists whose precise realist views of hardscrabble rural life became icons of national culture and sparked endless debates about the nature of modern art, died Friday at his home in Chadds Ford. He was 91."
From his website (one of my favorites of his collections):
"The Helga Pictures" are a fantastic compilation of tempera and dry brush paintings, watercolours and pencil studies secretly created within a span of over fifteen years. Andrew Wyeth created over two hundred and forty individual works of neighbour Helga Testorf from 1971 to 1985 without telling a single person, including his wife. He stated that he would not have been able to have finished the project with everyone looking at it.
Prussian-born Helga Testorf was thirty-two when she met Andrew Wyeth. They met while she was helping to look after a friend of Wyeth's who had also been a subject for some of his works. Helga had never modeled before but agreed to become his subject. What started out as an acquaintance evolved into a long-time friendship. She enjoyed the long, pensive hours she spent modelling for the artist. She became so comfortable with the artist that often she would lie sleeping while he painted her.
The Helga Pictures depicts a persistence of vision and technique from a perspective that is both objective and personal. They were not meant to be a psychological portrait of a person rather the study of the effects of light on a woman's body.
My mother is a watercolor artist, so this following quote by Wyeth speaks to me:
"With watercolour, you can pick up the atmosphere, the temperature, the sound of snow shifting through the trees or over the ice of a small pond or against a windowpane. Watercolour perfectly expresses the free side of my nature." - Andrew Wyeth
