May a host of angels sing him to his rest....

WEIRD... I just posted this photo yesterday on my flickr site....happening to mention how much it felt like an Andrew Wyeth scene....Hadn't thought of him for quite a while....And lo' and behold: this morning, less than 12 hours later...he's dead...creepy...

It's a really sad thing....I was obcessed with his work for a while....I remember the first time I saw "CHRISTINA'S WORLD" in a book as a kid...how mesmerizing it was...and then someone (probably my dad...) told me that the woman in the painting was a cripple (polio it turns out)....and it changed the whole painting...made it's meaning deeper..and showed me how appearances weren't the whole story....here i thought it was an idylic scene of a girl in the middle of nowhere...playing make-believe or something...It was a HUGE deal for me, when I got to see the actual painting at the MOMA sometime after moving here to NYC....

When I moved to Washington state....there was a time I spent out in the country at my parents new house...before they had finished closing up and selling my childhood home in Los Angeles...(another end of a chapter...and a huge turning point for me...)...I even spent a fall and winter in the house, a good chunk of it alone...it was bliss...and something about the country...in the rugged beauty of the Northwest must have made me susceptable to Mr. Wyeth's work...because there was a good while where I could think of and look at nothing else....there is a mystery, and silent contemplation to his work...the visual manefestation of lots of long ponderous walks alone...surrounded by nature's quiet....I even wrote him an (awkward...) letter trying to express how I really got his work...how I was a kindred spirit....Though I was probably none of those things ...I believe he was a bit of a grump, and that my emotional effusiveness was probably pretty off-putting to someone of his nature....

He came from an interesting family...lost his father, the famous artist N.C. WYETH when a train happened upon him and one of his grandsons (I forget whose kid...) stalled in a car at the crossing...Later the scandalous HELGA pictures came out...(scandalous....?)...I was aware of him mostly out of my periphery...but his presence was huge on me...especially my early artistic awakenings...and what a powerful thing an artists work can be....

My condelences to the Wyeth clan...Fortunately for the rest of us he left a body of work that will blow the minds of many future generations of artists as well as anyone fortunate to come across him...

Good bye Mr. Wyeth.