Wyeth in Provence
View from the Bike Path: Oh. That’s right.
My sister posted a photo of a painting by Andrew Wyeth, Willard’s Coat, painted in 1968 when I was 10. I experienced a moment of awe.
Not the meaningless kind of “awe” found in this century’s abused word “awesome.” Nor the kind recently hyped in Dacher Keltner’s book (which I will not read) about everyday wonder transforming my life.
Instead, it’s the reaction I have when something genuine, or an honest representation thereof, cuts through the miasma of human-generated bullshit that cloys modern life to reach my senses and remind me who I am.
I think, “Oh. That’s right.”
It’s the kind of awe I still sometimes feel when hearing Paul and George unleash a primal scream in their one-shot studio take of “Twist and Shout.” Or when Patric Stewart in season one of “Picard” says something so deeply insightful and says it so naturally that I go, “Wait, did that just happen?”
Now the painting keeps appearing in my Facebook feed. This time I noticed it looks like the inside of our shed. The apple looks like a random egg we found on a shelf in the pump room when we moved in. The dirty hanging coat is similar to one a British architect wore like Gandalf’s robe when he came to look at our place (arriving not by horse-drawn cart but in a high-end BMW — we hired someone else.)
I had an encounter with Wyeth once. After college graduation I was working the morning shift at Wawa baking partially hydrogenated cinnamon buns. Three things stand out about my time there: one was that I struggled counting change. Another was that the wife-and-husband managers saw management potential in me, but I was there to make a quick buck: I quit after two months to go backpacking in Europe. I remember their expression when I told them and feel guilty to this day.
The third thing was that one day she leaned over and whispered, “That’s Andrew Wyeth.” I looked and saw him in one of the aisles. When he came to pay for his coffee and pastry I must have had a “I’m a fan” look on my face, because his whole face twinkled.
I must be a weirdo because I was smitten. All this guy did his whole life was cloister himself with a canvas! He wasn’t trying to change the world or anything. But in my college years I had only two posters on my dorm room walls: one of Hong Kong and, later, another of Christina’s World. His paintings were kind of a big deal.
Maybe because his artistry was a gift to the future. Or maybe it’s just because I associated it with West Chester, PA where my grandmother once lived and where I got part of my identity. It was still mostly countryside back then. There were old stone houses, including the one she lived in and my mother after her. In the summer everything was lush. In the winter it was different shades of brown or snow-covered, somehow just as lovely.
Wyeth spent a lot of time in nearby Chadds Ford and painted scenes from that area, though many of his subjects were actually in Maine. He painted my ideal of the Brandywine Valley. He painted the rustic smells, if that’s possible, that I kind of grew up with. I loved it when he revealed his Helga paintings, and LOVED that he got such a kick out of scandalizing the stuffy art world.
Those works, too, were reminders of our genuine state of being.
And maybe that’s why I’m living here in Provence, like Wyeth a bit of a hermit cloistered with the canvas of my computer... or rather like a Hobbit near rolling hills and farmland, as far as I can get from the miasma of the Big People (though my iPhone and MacBook Air serve as Palentirs to both the wicked and the Wyeth.)
And why I go for long bike rides and look from the path to the fields and big old stone houses and sometimes get a hit of “Oh. That’s right.”
That hasn’t come easily to a guy who’s seen too much of the world to be awed by much besides the unaffected screams of teenage Beatles and a really good screenplay performed by a really fine artist.
It’s a welcome feeling and nice to have it again and again (Facebook you suck anyway) when Willard’s Coat appears in my feed.
