Andrew Wyeth died

One of the best-known American realist painter, died on 16th last month, aged 91.

Almost all his paintings were about people and places around him in his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and his summer home in Cushing, Maine. The above is probably his best-known painting, Christina's World, depicting his neigbour who was crippled by polio crawling back to her house, now known as the Olson House.

He painted with tempera, an egg yolk based paint medium widely used before oils. I tried myself in school days (out of curiosity that egg goes well with pigments besides bacon). It proved too difficult for me to grasp. It's similar to acrylic, only dries extremely fast that leaves no room for you to mix on panel. So it's a painstaking process of layering and layering. Patience were short then. Weyth finished about two paintings in a year. You can see why.

One interesting fact worth mentioning. M. Night Shyamalan based his movie The Village on Wyeth's paintings. The village seen in the film was built in its entirety in one field outside Chadds Ford, not far from Wyeth's studio. Can you tell from below their connection?


He is the painter who was loved by the people more than critics. A typical situation reflects what often happens between the "art world" and the general public. An extract from The Wall Street Journal by columnist Terry Teachout may sum up the point:

Part of Wyeth's problem, of course, is that he was so very, very popular. In the ever-relevant words of Max Harrison, "People do not object to artists deserving success – only to their getting it." At a time when the vast majority of serious American art critics believed abstraction to be the One Best Way to paint, it was hugely irksome that America's most successful painter should have been firmly committed not just to representation, but to near-photographic realism. Why did the benighted masses insist on preferring "Christina's World" to the drips and spatters of Jackson Pollock? The answer was self-evident, at least to the art-world commentariat: Most people are stupid.

Though the debate between styles of art seems pointless these days of the postmodern, our appreciation of arts will always be influenced by the critics, media and the overall temperament of our time. The best we can do, I suggest, is to put on a noise-cancelling earphone, stand in front of a painting and listen only to our eyes.