Andrew Wyeth

Dogwood

1983

Jamie Wyeth "Herring Gulls" 1978 Color Lithograph Signed Lower Right Numbered Lower Left 149/300 Born in 1946, James Browning Wyeth came of age when the meaning of patriotism was clouded by the traumas of the Vietnam War and the scandals of Watergate. Working in an era of turmoil and questioning of governmental authority, he did art that encompassed both marching off to war and marching in protest. One of James's early masterworks, Draft Age (1965) depicts a childhood friend as a defiant Vietnam-era teenager resplendent in dark sunglasses and black leather jacket in a suitably insouciant pose. Two years later Wyeth painstakingly composed a haunting, posthumous Portrait of President John F. Kennedy (1967) that seems to catch the martyred Chief Executive in a moment of agonized indecision. As Wyeth Center curator Lauren Raye Smith points out, Wyeth "did not deify the slain president, [but] on the contrary made him seem almost too human." Based on hours of study and sketching of JFK's brothers Robert and Edward - documented by insightful studies in the exhibition - the final, pensive portrait seemed too realistic to family members and friends. "His brother Robert," writes Smith in the exhibition catalogue, "reportedly felt uneasy about this depiction, and said it reminded him of the President during the Bay of Pigs invasion." In spite of these misgivings, James's JFK likeness has been reproduced frequently and is one of the highlights of this show. The poignancy, appeal and perceptiveness of this portrait, painted when the youngest Wyeth was 21 years old, makes one wish he would do more portraits of important public figures. James himself feels he is at his best painting people he knows well, as exemplified by his vibrant Portrait of Jean Kennedy Smith (1972), which captures the vitality of the slain President's handsome sister. He did paint a portrait of Jimmy Carter for the January 1977 man-of-the-year cover of Time magazine, showing the casually dressed President-elect as a straightforward character posed under a flag-draped water tower next to the family peanut plant in Plains, Ga. James recalls that Carter had one Secret Service agent guarding him as he posed outdoors, a far cry from the protection our Chief Executives require today. As a participating artist in the "Eyewitness to Space" program organized by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art in the late 1960s, Wyeth deftly recorded in a series of watercolors his eyewitness observations of dramatic spacecraft launchings and more mundane scenes associated with the space program. Commissioned by Harper's Magazine to cover the 1974 congressional hearings and trials of Watergate figures, James Wyeth executed a series of perceptive and now evocative sketches that recall those dark chapters in our history. Memorable images include a scowling John Ehrlichman, a hollow-eyed Bob Haldeman, an owlish Charles Colson, a focused Congressman Peter Rodino, a grim visaged Father/ Congressman Robert Drinan, and vignettes of the press and various courtroom activities. An 11-by-14-inch pencil sketch of the unflappable Judge John Sirica is especially well done. These "images are powerful as historical records," observes Smith, "and as lyrically journalistic impressions of events that changed the nation forever." Wyeth's sketch of early-morning crowds lined up outside the Supreme Court building hoping to hear the Watergate case, with the ubiquitous TV cameramen looking on, is reminiscent of recent scenes as the high court grappled with the Bush-Gore contest. The Wyeth family penchant for whimsy and enigmatic images is evident in Islanders (1990), showing two of James's friends, wearing goofy hats, sitting on the porch of a small Monhegan Island (Me.) cottage draped with a large American flag. Mixing the serious symbolism of Old Glory with the irreverent appearance of the two men, James has created a puzzling but interesting composition. Painting White House...

Brown Cottonwood, 2005 By Andrew Millner (American, b. 1967) Lightjet Print Mounted on UV Plex Signed Lower Right Unframed: 87" x 44" Framed: 88" x 45" Andrew Millner is a visual artist based in St. Louis, MO. His work investigates the relationship between art and nature, the natural and the made. Millner received a BFA from University of Michigan, in Painting and Sculpture. He has had more than 56 group exhibitions since 1987 and over 15 solo exhibitions at institutions including Miller Yezerski Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts; Ellen Miller Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts; CCA, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Tria Gallery, New York City, New York; Richard Levy Gallery, Albuquerque, New Mexico; David Floria Gallery, Aspen, Colorado; Contemporary Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri. "I started drawing on the computer in 2005. Previous to that, most of my work had been about finding lines in nature; the contours of leaves, the ripples on rivers, the edges of overlapping hills. Although I was using traditional art materials, I prepared the canvases with slicker and slicker surfaces so that the lines wouldn’t soak into the background but sit on top, preserving the nuances of my hand. I thought of the drawings as photographic, in the diaristic sense of recording moments of time. I enjoyed the easy correspondence of the endless novelty of line in these natural forms and the endless variety of line created by my hand. I couldn’t draw the same leaf twice so my subject and process were well matched. I had the idea to draw every leaf of a tree, but I struggled with the scale and complexity of the subject. How does one bring a tree indoors? How can one see the whole tree and its individual parts simultaneously? I tried traditional strategies and materials but the results were unsatisfactory. I wondered if it would be possible to make the drawing on a computer. Since everything… music, photos, movies & books were being digitized, what about drawing? I wasn’t interested in something computer-generated, but sought to “dumb down” the computer and use it as a repository for simple line drawings. In the program I use, Adobe Illustrator, lines are called “paths”… an apt name since the line exists at no set scale or color. Only later do I assign the attributes of color and thickness. Taking my laptop outdoors, I drew my first tree “en plein air.” Using a digital tablet and pen, I drew simple contours of the leaves and branches. Having these drawings remain in digital form rather than in physical form, opened up interesting possibilities and enabled me to tackle the complexity of a tree in intriguing ways. My lines were free and separate from the background and from each other. I drew the branches individually and then later, I could cobble them together to reconstitute the whole tree. On the screen, I could zoom in and out and draw at different scales simultaneously. I could zoom out to draw a simple contour of the entire trunk and then zoom in to draw the smallest leaf with equal effort. I drew in layers so that as the drawings accumulated I could turn layers “off” so that they wouldn’t obscure subsequent layers. These two novelties, drawing at different scales simultaneously and making parts of the drawing invisible to allow for work on top or behind previous drawings, allowed for the accumulation of hundreds of simple outlines to create a dizzying visual complexity. Subsequent trees I drew from photographs. I would take hundreds of close-ups of a tree from a single point of view and then stitch all of these close ups together on the computer. Sometimes I photographed the same tree in the summer and then in the fall after it lost its leaves. This allowed me to see and draw all of the branches and limbs unadorned and unobscured. I would draw the tree twice, with and without leaves, merging the two drawings into one document. In this way, the drawings comprise and compress great spans of looking over vast time frames and seemingly contradictory close-up and distant points of view. My digital drawings have been outputted in different ways… mostly as photographs printed directly from the digital file or as archival inkjet prints. The results defy easy categorization. Are they drawings, prints, or camera-less photographs...

"Quart and a Half" is an American Realist abstract landscape watercolor on paper painting by Andrew Wyeth in 1961. The artwork is 21 x 29 1/4 inches and is 33 3/4 x 42 1/4 x 1 inches...

Lithograph on vélin paper. Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Published and printed by Art in America, New York in an edition of CDVII/D. From the folio, The Four Se...