the Picture
“Oftentimes people will like a picture I paint because it’s maybe the sun hitting on the side of a window and they can enjoy it purely for itself,” Wyeth once said. “It reminds them of some afternoon. But for me, behind that picture could be a night of moonlight when I’ve been in some house in Maine, a night of some terrible tension, or I had this strange mood. Maybe it was Halloween. It’s all there, hiding behind the realistic side.”
— Andrew Wyeth, who died today
Related material:
“In the pictures of the old masters, Max Picard wrote in The World of Silence, people seem as though they had just come out of the opening in a wall… ”
— Annie Dillard in For the Time Being
— Susanna Kaysen in Girl, Interrupted