This week I traveled to Raleigh for a conference and visited the North Carolina Museum of Art for the first time. A number of memorable works from Joseph Cornell, Ed Ruscha, Daisy Youngblood and much more.
Though I've never been an enormous fan of Andrew Wyeth, this painting's enduring creepiness continues to haunt me. From the ghostly images in the upper left window to sheet pushed out of the upper right window looking like the head of a crazed ram, it's damned spooky. What doesn't translate in this scanned image is the placid water in the can in the foreground of the painting and the clothesline dividing the image in two.
1 comment:
Your creepy feeling was by design.In June I visited the Olson House. In almost every room of that empty house there are a few small reproductions of paintings that Wyeth had painted in that room. Here is Wyeth's own comment about a painting called "Wind from the Sea" (1947) that I copied down in a notebook: "Of all my work at Olsons this seems to me the one that expresses a great deal without too much in it. I walked up into the dry, attic room one day. It was a hot day in August, so hot that I went over to the window, pushed it up about six inches and as I stood there, looking out, all of a sudden this curtain that had been lying there stale for years, began slowly to rise, and the birds crocheted on it began to move. My hair about stood on end."
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