Exploring Paintings

See this YouTube Video and get to know Andrew Wyeth's paintings. The video is about 9 minutes long, so sit back and enjoy the experience. Note which ones appeal to you, and choose one of them to write about in the manner of the essay below. We will need to go to Images at Google or Bing.com to find it to include in your essay.

http://mywebspiration.com/view/466770a2144b

Questions to ask and starting points to explore as you look at a painting. Try to let your eye enter into and let your mind participate with the painting. You might pretend it's a dream image and consider how you'd feel... Consider:

1. What is the figure and the ground, that is, the close focus and the background. How do they relate?

2. What is the dominant mood? How does the painting or painter set it up?

3. What do the images remind you of, in terms of your memories or what you know or have read?

4. What images are juxtaposed or positioned nearby each other to set up a contrast that seems deliberate.

5. Are there vertical levels or layers to the painting? What do they suggest?

6. Where do the images in the painting draw your eye? Participate with those movements and reflect on them.

Today I am exploring Andrew Wyeth's painting Soaring. This piece is on permanent display at the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont. I notice the horizontality of the wings of the visually largest turkey vulture so matching the low hilly undulations that resolve into a flat distance. The browns in the low hills and valleys, which seem mostly from the day's shadows, have a somber tone, and the sky has a neutral gray or silver display of its own, with a shadow as well, a lowly-lying darker cloud, in the distance. Cloudy feathers seem connected and arched upward from this cloud, faintly reminiscent of the turkey vulture, perhaps its "spirit double." The low-lying hills, and our point of view just behind and slightly above the largest bird, does make us feel we could very well venture to those distant spirit clouds. Gosh, the wingspan of this bird almost fills the painting! No wonder it is called Soaring. The bird feathers have a mosaic quality, almost a Native American headdress pattern where the feathers meet the wing bones. The mild graininess of the land directly below makes it feel as though we are passing over land at great speeds. I like the hint of green in the brown, but the landscape does seem barren or arid.

Yet for all this horizontality and sense of soaring above these hills into distance, the other two vultures are not soaring horizontally. They are descending around and over a white farmhouse, seen minutely below, casting late-day shadows to the left. The question Why are they descending there? suddenly looms, and they seem to be spiralling down out of interest. Then the vultureness of these birds with their tiny, ugly heads, their scavenger aspect belying their colossal beauty and wingspan emerges. Why? What do they see or sense near this farmhouse? It is purely "farm management" related -- vegetable compost or chicken entrails, perhaps? Farmhouses are notorious for being steeped in the practicalities of life and its constant recycling. Chickens eat yesterday's household scraps, making tomorrow's eggs from it. So does the contrast of spiritual soaring with such practical matters as scavenging and eating spell out this painting's message? Very Buddhist!

Or is there something more insidious and sinister suggested by these ugly avian monsters spiralling down on the tiny farmhouse. The house seems off-center, leaning to the left toward its shadow and toward a larger darker zone reminiscent of a depression in the land. Depression? The very word casts a shadow and then resonates darkly into the painting's other dark patches. The whiteness of the house seems so brave and declarative, but so small, almost tucked into the highest vulture's wing, while the lowest vulture seems to aim for it, its visually smaller wingspan wider than the house itself. Will the highest vulture also descend? That is the biggest question for me. Will it form the pattern, the famous pattern of three so celebrated in ancient stories, the confirming number, the empowering and entrancing number, possibly spelling out the answer to this question. On the back of that question, I ride. -- John Chamberlain

A YouTube "Museum Minute: Andrew Wyeth Soaring"