Got some Mazy Star playing as I sit inside on this hot, partly sunny day. I spent the morning working on an urban landscape. I am fascinated by the double decker freeway where I-10 crosses Cincinnati. I ride my bike there when I go to the San Pedro Library and I’ve always loved the sound of traffic and the way the light hits all the concrete. I’ve got a few good photos of the intersection that I’m going to paint so this is the first in a new series. I did’t get to my next library painting today but focused on this one instead. Tomorrow I’ll go plein air paint another library, maybe Collins Garden.
I’m reading a biography of Andrew Wyeth. Although I live in Texas and have been here almost 30 years, I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, 15 minutes from where Andrew Wyeth lived in Chads Ford, Pennsylvania. We would drive by Keurner’s farm all the time growing up. We had a coffee table book of Wyeth and I recognized the house. It mesmerized me every time I saw it, reminding me of the paintings I’d seen at home.
I never knew Andrew Wyeth was a famous painter when I was young. I just thought he was our local painter that everyone loved. When I found out he did “Christina’s World” in Main, and that he lived there part of the year, I was incensed. “No. He lived here!” I would argue. “He also lived in Main.” People would say, rolling their eyes. It took several times of being told for me to accept it. I wanted him to be all ours. I wanted him to be our painter, not anyone else’s.
He would have been around the same age as my grandparents, born in 1917. Reading about his life in Chads Ford has made me nostalgic and a little homesick. Except, I want home the way home was forty years ago. I want to go back in time, to the Gilded Age even, to when Andrew Wyeth was growing up among the rolling hills and flora and fauna of Chads Ford and Wilmington. I want to go back to when there were less people and more miles of farmland.
I also find myself wishing I’d grown up in a big family led by a successful artist/father like NC Wyeth. Reading the book obviously shows that the family was full of disfunction, but it’s still fun to dream: of growing up in a home with lots of siblings, all whip smart and busy creating. Quotes of NC Wyeth’s letters describe the children all sitting in the living room on winter evenings drawing. It sounds idyllic.
I’m heading out in a bit to meet the last visitors to my exhibit at San Antonio College. I’ve had an exhibit up in the library there for two months. Today it’s time to take everything down which is bitter sweet. It’s nice to get all my paintings down and back home but also sad that they won’t be on display anymore. Another drawback is having 16 paintings to find space for… I sometimes think about dropping a bunch of paintings off at a thrift store just to get them out of my way. It is one of the things about being a painter that’s hard. My walls are full of artwork. Please take some.