Dressed up for the end
The museum says that famed painter Wyeth (1917-2009) envisions his own funeral in the recently rediscovered series of drawings from the 1990s. "The exhibition connects the sketches now known as the Funeral Group to Wyeth’s decades-long engagement with death as an artistic subject in painting, his relationships with the models depicted, and his expressive and exploratory use of drawing." Wyeth lived on the Maine Coast for much of his life.
About the title: The Reverend Doctor Christopher Syn is the smuggler hero of a series of novels by Russell Thorndike. The first book, Doctor Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh, was published in 1915. The story idea came from smuggling in the 18th-century Romney Marsh, in England, where brandy and tobacco were brought in at night by boat from France to avoid taxes.
'Doorway to the sea'
“The world of New England is in that house – spidery, like crackling skeletons rotting in the attic – dry bones. It’s like a tombstone to sailors lost at sea, the Olson ancestor who fell from the yardarm of a square-rigger and was never found. It’s the doorway of the sea to me, of mussels and clams and sea monsters and whales.’’
-- Painter Andrew Wyeth, on the home of his model Christina Olson, in Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life (1996), by Richard Meryman
To see the bone structure
"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show."
-- Andrew Wyeth
Mr. Wyeth was famous for his paintings set in Maine and Pennsylvania.
Woodland meditation
"Seated by a Tree'' (watercolor on paper, 1973)), by Andrew Wyeth, in the show "Andrew Wyeth: Drawings and Watercolors,'' at the Adelson Galleries, Boston, opening April 15.
Those woods look like those a week before they leaf out in April.
Art appreciation on Federal Hill
Commentary and photograph by WILLIAM MORGAN
Christina Olson, the cripple depicted in Andrew's Wyeth's 1948 painting "Christina's World, '' has moved beyond the iconic, even beyond kitsch, to the commonplace – as ubiquitous as the "Mona Lisa ''or "Whistler's Mother''.
Still, her appearance as a bit of graffiti on a utility meter box is a bit jarring. A purple house with orange highlights in Luongo Memorial Square , in the Federal Hill section of Providence, suggests that the neighborhood is having a renaissance. Or at least educated people who will get the reference are moving in.