Recently I read Richard Merryman’s biography, Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life, and was moved by his portrait of this complex man. He writes:

“This tenderness for unappreciated people reduced by life – his reverence for self-sufficiency and perseverance – is a fundamental energy in Wyeth’s work. He has said,  ‘ I think one’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes. I see no reason for painting but that. If I have anything to offer, it is my emotional contact with the place where I live and the people I do.’ He has also said, ‘Love is not nearly as useful as hate.’

The opposite energy – ‘hate’ – is a coadrenaline driving the intensity he pours into each painting. It is his word for the free-floating rage and fear – and the profound seriousness – he hides beneath a puckish irreverence. Ricocheting between love and hate, he is a thicket of opposites – kind, weak, tough, selfish, insecure, egotistical, poetic, wise, elegant, vulgar, naive, and ruthlessly determined. A mischievous anarchist, he is excitable to the point of wildness; his square, boyish face – below wiry, close-cropped light brown hair – is as rubbery as a clown’s. Laughter puckers the corners of his bright blue,  hooded, conspiratorial eyes into crow’s-feet. He clicks his teeth as he cackles with delight.

Yet this intricate sprite is drawn to simplicity, to the understatement of winter, to white, to the restrictions of realism, and the driest, most lapidary of all mediums – egg tempera – a compound of powdered pigment, distilled water, and egg yolk that hardens on the panel almost instantly. He says,  ‘I begin with emotion and am excited to the point where it affects my stomach. That’s where I’m odd to paint the way I do, these immaculate pictures, closely done. You’d think you’d find a very calm mathematician.’

…In the winter of 1945,  Andrew painted the dilapidated interior of Archie’s [Mother Archie’s Church]. Its name was a mispronunciation of its founder, Mary Archer, a stocky, quiet woman of mixed blood who wore a black bonnet and preached in a black dress with white lace around the neck…[In the painting] a jagged hole shows black in the battered plaster. Beneath an oil-lamp chandelier a white dove flutters. Talking about  Mother Archie’s Church, he tells of an Easter Service when the climax was to be the Holy Ghost released in the form of a dove. The cue was sounded, nothing happened; a long pause. Then a voice called through the trap door, ‘ The cat ate the Holy Ghost. Shall I throw down the cat?’ “

What stays with me is  how lovingly Merryman captured the many, often contradictory,  facets and layers that made up Andrew Wyeth. If only we could all see and be seen so wholly and so well.