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Great Tradition. Wyeth's instinct is to paint only what he knows well, which limits him to Pennsylvania and. Maine landscapes and to portraits of friends. His watercolor landscapes may take as little as 20 minutes — after which he lies down exhausted. In them he shows something of Winslow Homer's eaglelike capacity for observing and seizing the beauties of nature. But Wyeth's reputation rests mainly on his carefully wrought temperas, which are in the great tradition of a igth-Century Pennsylvanian : Thomas Eakins. Wyeth's temperas are not yet in the same class with the master's oils — Eakins put far more weight and space into his pictures and constructed them far more surely out of a greater diversity of elements — but at 34 Wyeth is still growing.
A Crow Flew By is a telling example of his growth. Wyeth decided to paint it the day he called on the man in the picture and found him alone in his murky shack, leaning forward into the light. Wyeth made scores of sketches of the man, the room, the clothes on the wall, then painted from them. Typically, he began with the plaster wall, leaving blank spaces for the clothes and the figure. Then he painted in the clothes, and finally the man himself.
His Own Road. The title, Wyeth says, was an incidental afterthought, but it is appropriate. The figure has the wasted, weightless look of extreme age; it seems to lean on the air. The blue denim jacket gleams like plumage and the work-worn hands are talonlike. Composed in a passive spiral, the figure is crossed by a sword-sharp flick of light. Somehow — > perhaps because it looks like the last touch of a setting sun — the light brings darkness and death to mind.
A bleak, still, deathly quality pervades much of Wyeth's work, contrasts strangely with his warm nature. Possibly illness has left a deeper mark on his art than on the man. Possibly, too, he will one day paint the summer of life as convincingly as he now pictures its autumn.
"Nothing means anything to me except painting," Andy says. "I'm warped in that direction. I have a terrible urge. Once I get a good subject I'm happy, but I go through hell to get that subject. I've got to have a definite connection with it ... I think I'd probably commit suicide if I couldn't paint."
Crop-haired, thin and amiable as ever, Wyeth basked in the success of his retrospective show this week. Soon he would be struck by the subject for a new tempera, and begin the long, hard, solitary labor that each one means for him. Since painting is creating what never existed before, it always means working in the dark. But Wyeth's feet are firmly on his own road; he moves ahead.