“I think a person permeates a spot, and a lost presence makes the environment timeless to me, keeps an area alive. It pulsates because of that.” ― Andrew Wyeth
We took a short trip to midcoast Maine to visit The Farnsworth Art Museum a few weeks back. Because the Wyeth family spent a lot of time in this region, it’s no surprise to see the museum hold a considerable collection of the generational legacy of the Wyeth family. The Farnsworth really is a treat, and I hope I have opportunity to visit again.
Our mission was to see Andrew Wyeth’s watercolors which were scheduled to be on view for only a couple more weeks past our visit. I first fell in love with his work when I saw Winter Fields in the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum during the Biennial last year. It was so clean; so organized; so perfectly still.
While Andrew is well-known for his tempera paintings which are beautifully executed, tight and controlled, I find his watercolors luminous, contemplative, and yet somehow charged with potency. They feel almost inverse to each other.
There were so many great paintings to talk about; I really had trouble choosing one I liked best. I narrowed my choices to three: The Kitchen Door, Burning Trash, and Untitled (Wiley Farm), until I was finally moved to earliest of the three: The Kitchen Door.
The Kitchen Door was painted in 1942 when Andrew Wyeth was only 25 years old. His career continued for another 63 years, and by this point, he had already been painting nine years. Just to put things into perspective, this watercolor was done five years after his first solo exhibition, and six years prior to his most famous painting, Christina’s World.
I do not know if Wyeth was a religious man, but if his work reflects him personally, it is of a natural formulae: pigment, egg, water, wood pulp, and time. The residue of his work indicates a man who thrived in solitude, cerebral and maybe slightly disconnected from other humans, but intimately connected with life and landscape: A witness in the holiest form.
At first glance of The Kitchen Door, I noticed only a dwelling structure against a pale, energetic sky: was it morning or evening? To begin the conversation, I moved my glance upward and left. Then reading left to right, the sky led me to the chimney; I stole a glance to a rain gutter fashioned in a line so economic, I thought instantly of white-label beer. The gutter ushered me to the foreground, then back around: a stack of wood, some grass. It is windy and the grass is blowing toward the house at an angle – a “north wind.”
I walk my eyes down the hill to the east, curious to glimpse the far distance: some trees, a pole – maybe a neighboring town has some industry? What do people do out there? The horizon clouds carry me back to the foreground, to the wood, to the house, to the windows reflecting light that lives infinitely at dusk and dawn.
Finally, I see the rounded shape of a flatcap, then a collar, down a spine, around to a knee where rests an elbow supporting an arm-to-hand cupping a match to light a cigarette. Yes. Absolute yes. So much yes, in fact, I can almost smell the match I imagine warms the palms of his hand. I know the sound of match, the smell of burnt sulphur, the warmth of tiny flame. I know this moment as sacred. Nobody to bother me. Time is of my own.
I find myself wanting to peek inside the kitchen. I am blocked by the man and his moment; am I invading his space? His smoke, like hearth inside: man is house.
I move my eye forward to the southwest. I notice shadows on the structure: are these shadows cast by another building? It feels too angular to be otherwise. Where is the sun? It sure is breezy. Is that a north wind? Now I’m back at that drainpipe, moving up and around in the glorious balance of movement and quiescence.
The simplicity and quiet of this liminal space allow the viewer to converse with Wyeth through the painting. Captured in this single frame anticipates the pleasure of a few stolen moments from the demands of the day. What liberation awaits, if even only for a few minutes. It is pure potential energy.
Having moved through my own story of this man’s day, I linger a bit on Wyeth’s craft: I love how he scrubs a warmer wash in front of the clouds to differentiate between sky and smoke. Without it, the smoke might be lost, and it seems that maybe smoke (or maybe even more broadly: energy conversion) is a central theme of this piece.
The stack of wood as focal point holds one-third of a secular trinity: the stack lives central in the lower third of the composition, its weight contradicts the open billowing of the sky (which feels like it is moving south, behind the house). Its future destination forms a triangle of inferred physical motion to the chimney source inside the house; a straight line to the right. Wood burns, smoke moves upward and reconvenes with the sky. As the body burns energy and disperses its chemical construct through breath, so does the wood redistribute energy for Earth to reclaim..
Among a treasury of magnificent paintings, The Kitchen Door holds its own. Stuffed with metaphor, muted tones of either dawn or dusk (who knows, really); the quiet suspension of time is undeniably relatable in a culture nestled so deeply into a person’s time.
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