Picture This

On Andrew Wyeth. A guest post by Katy Wheatley

Following my original post inspired by the late, English art critic John Berger and his revelatory work Ways of Seeing I’m starting a series (I hope) of collaborative posts with other writers. This week I am really thrilled and excited that

Katy Wheatley

has agreed to share her brilliant thoughts and words on a painting by the American visual artist Andrew Wyeth titled Wind from The Sea.

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Wind From The Sea By Andrew Wyeth

My first love was words. I remember when I first understood that you could enjoy a story or a poem and then you could start unpicking all the words of those stories and poems and create myriad other stories and meanings. It was a revelation to me that you could ask questions of words or lines. It was like opening a secret trapdoor into a whole other world lying hidden underneath.

It took me a lot longer to realise that you could do the same thing with images. I didn’t find art that I liked looking at until I was in my late teens. I had grown up going to galleries. I wasn’t scared of art, but most of the art I saw was at best burdened with the label ‘municipal’. I still have very strong feelings about brown Dutch paintings and dyspeptic portraits of people struggling with ill-fitting undergarments.

What is the painting of?

I was delighted to be asked to write about an image. I thought about using a family photograph. When I tell you that the best photo I have of myself as a child is one my dad took of me and an elephant at a zoo, and that the image is a blank wall with the elephant’s tail moving out of shot at one side of the photo and my foot moving out of shot in the other, you will see why I chose a painting.

After much deliberation I chose a painting called Wind from the Sea, painted in 1947 by the American artist, Andrew Wyeth.

The painting shows an open window looking out over flat, dry lands to dark hills and the odd tree on the horizon. To the left is a sliver of water, beginning to widen as it reaches the edge of the window frame. A dusty, double dirt track cuts across the field from the door of the house below, disappearing to places unknown. The walls look like stained, grey concrete. The blind at the top of the window is creased and cracked with light and the frayed net curtains in front of them blow back into the room.

Wyeth painted over three hundred paintings of windows. This was painted in the summer of 1947 at the farm of the Olson family in Maine where he spent significant chunks of time painting the farm and the family. He said of this painting:

‘That summer in 1947 I was in one of the attic rooms feeling the dryness of everything and it was so hot I pried open a window. A west wind filled the dusty, frayed lace curtains and the delicate crocheted birds began to flutter and fly.’

Why did you choose this painting?

Nothing happens in this painting, but there is so much going on under the surface. I love paintings of thresholds. I am an enthusiastic explorer of liminal spaces and I’m always intrigued by what happens in the in-between. Here, the subject matter offers thresholds to explore and then there’s the added joy of the liminal spaces that exist between painter and canvas, canvas and the viewer. I couldn’t be more thrilled.

I love the pared back monochromatic palette Wyeth uses. The dark browns of the distant hills and trees, the rusty, yellow brown of the fields and the clear white spaces of sky and water could be indicative of an autumnal or winter landscape. It is only the wide open window and the bar of harsh light falling on the windowsill that tells us that these are the bleached out colours of a merciless summer.

This ambiguity is carried into the domestic interior, where the water stained, grey walls and raw wood of the window frame, echo the colours outside the window. Outside, nature is changing its state under the onslaught of the sun. The dirt paths are turning to grey dust, the grass is crisp underfoot. Inside, the walls are cracked and stained, the blind is brittle, the edges of the billowing lace curtain are frayed. Things are coming undone. The colours and details in this painting give me a sense of quiet brutality. There is no forgiveness in these lines.

How does this painting make you feel?

Because the only thing that moves in this painting is the wind, to me, this painting is an evocation of a moment of that exhausted, washed out, fullness that a hot summer can bring. It feels like the wind is a prayer for rain that isn’t answered. This is a time of stillness, of the ripeness of summer that will either burst with rain or fire. It speaks to me of a held breath. I think about the salt in the breeze coming off the sea and how that is as corrosive to domesticity as the sun. I think about the parching smell of sun warmed dust and the prickly aroma of grass that is becoming hay. I think about what it might feel like to be trekking across that broad field outside with no shelter and the sea sliding out of view to my left promising a coolness I can’t grasp.

As a viewer, we are invited to look out, not in, but the glimpses of the room we are given lead me to wonder what kind of a house this is? The only nod to anything remotely luxurious are the net curtains, woven with delicate, darting birds brought to life in the blessed moment of relief that the breeze brings. I always imagine the rest of the room is empty, even though the artist must be there with all his paints. This does not feel like space that is inhabited. The house itself, the curtains and the desire paths cutting away into the distance tell me that it is, but to me it feels like a vast empty space that is more concerned with past lives than anything that is capable of sustaining life going forward.

I, as the viewer of the painting see a double frame. The physical confines of the painting itself draws me into the room and then the window frame draws me out of the building altogether. As a viewer I am travelling. My role is not static. I am moving into the space while the breeze is blowing out. The landscape is broken up by the windowpanes, the paths and the horizon. The strange angle of the window, slanting towards the corner of the painting further disorients me. I want to know why he didn’t paint this square on, with equal amounts of window frame on either side?

The painting shows us everything and nothing. It begs us to consider the life outside it. The lack of people in what is a domestic space asks us where they are and what they’re doing? Who hung the curtains? Who made these delicate, beautiful things and hung them in this decaying house? These are curtains that are designed to let light in and stop people looking in, but in this empty landscape who’s looking? Is this the artist’s house? If it isn’t, who does it belong to?

I ask myself how long the painter sat up there in the sweltering heat, waiting to catch a breeze and pin it to canvas? I think about how he knew that this was the painting he wanted to make? I want to talk to him about the difficulties of painting things like heat and the movement of air and how he managed to paint stillness into a painting that is all about movement.

I want to thank him.

Katy Wheatley has two substacks. Shenanigans and Stuff is things that she thinks about and has nowhere else to put. Her posts are illuminating and whenever I read them I think that Katy has articulated something that has been rumbling away inside of me, but has not yet fully formed. As she says here she is interested in liminal spaces. She is brilliant at expressing her thoughts with humour and pathos.

Her other account is OddGoodLife where she shares readings and knowledge about the Tarot. She describes her technique as more Miriam Margolyes than Mystic Meg.

Thanks for reading and seeing.

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