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The gap
Andrew Wyeth • Painting, 1994, 50.8×71.1 cm
Description of the artwork «The gap»
Andrew Wyeth, although he was a realist and was even criticized for his adherence to such an outdated style for the 20th century, was also a master of strange surreal self-portraits (1, 2). And the picture "Break" 1994 is perhaps the strangest of them all. Especially if you imagine that at the time of writing the artist was already 77 years old.
At first glance, the plot looks overwhelmingly creepy: as if in the ice, crumbling from the arrival of the first spring heat, human hands, blackened from frost, are visible. But in fact, everything is somewhat more complicated: Wyeth depicted on the ice a pair of his own hands, moreover, cast from bronze. His wife Betsy commissioned surgeon Adrian E. Flatt in 1976 to make a fiberglass cast of the artist's hands. Ten years later, from this cast at the Laran Bronze Foundry, Inc. in the city of Chester, Pennsylvania, a copy of it was cast in bronze.
Wyeth's bronze hands settled in his house on a window sill overlooking the nearby Brandywine River. Apparently, the bizarre imposition of this sculpture on the landscape of Brandywine Valley, which the artist had the opportunity to contemplate every day, became the inspiration for this unusual composition.
Winter was one of Wyeth's favorite seasons. This time of year was the best fit for living his melancholic feelings, thanks to which even summer landscapes left the artist as desolate and piercing as winter views (1, 2). He wrote: “I prefer winter and autumn, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - its loneliness - the dead feeling of winter. Something lurked under her cover: the whole story is not shown in its entirety ".
So in the painting "The Break" all of Wyeth disappeared into the waters of the river, leaving only his hands on its surface, as if frozen in an invisible piano chord - like a symbol of a soul trapped in the snowy captivity of winter. Shards of ice, similar to jagged blades, surround the white raft on all sides, threatening to collide. And fifty shades of brown all around: in trees, frozen ground and even water buried under ice.
Wyeth rarely painted self-portraits in the classical sense of the word - literally one, two and missed. He admitted that he preferred to abstract from the objects that he portrayed, especially when it was about himself: “It’s a pity that I can’t write without being present, so that only my hands are there.” Moreover, the artist argued that his creativity was at its peak in those moments when he felt detached or separated from himself. The body reminded of his human existence, and only in isolation from it did his consciousness achieve maximum clarity and creative freedom.
In general, what Wyeth describes strongly resembles dissociation - this is the name of the protective mechanism of the psyche, which protects it from difficult and difficult feelings. In such cases, a person's consciousness seems to be split off from the body, and he begins to perceive what is happening as if from the outside. John Wilmerding in his book "Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic" decoded the artist's tendency to dissociation: “As long as he imagines himself to be a thing or part of a landscape, Wyeth can maintain the fiction that he is an invisible seer. Perhaps that is why he so rarely painted ordinary self-portraits, since for this it was necessary to look in the mirror, thereby destroying his cherished idea of himself as a hidden observer. ".
The author: Natalia Azarenko
At first glance, the plot looks overwhelmingly creepy: as if in the ice, crumbling from the arrival of the first spring heat, human hands, blackened from frost, are visible. But in fact, everything is somewhat more complicated: Wyeth depicted on the ice a pair of his own hands, moreover, cast from bronze. His wife Betsy commissioned surgeon Adrian E. Flatt in 1976 to make a fiberglass cast of the artist's hands. Ten years later, from this cast at the Laran Bronze Foundry, Inc. in the city of Chester, Pennsylvania, a copy of it was cast in bronze.
Wyeth's bronze hands settled in his house on a window sill overlooking the nearby Brandywine River. Apparently, the bizarre imposition of this sculpture on the landscape of Brandywine Valley, which the artist had the opportunity to contemplate every day, became the inspiration for this unusual composition.
Winter was one of Wyeth's favorite seasons. This time of year was the best fit for living his melancholic feelings, thanks to which even summer landscapes left the artist as desolate and piercing as winter views (1, 2). He wrote: “I prefer winter and autumn, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - its loneliness - the dead feeling of winter. Something lurked under her cover: the whole story is not shown in its entirety ".
So in the painting "The Break" all of Wyeth disappeared into the waters of the river, leaving only his hands on its surface, as if frozen in an invisible piano chord - like a symbol of a soul trapped in the snowy captivity of winter. Shards of ice, similar to jagged blades, surround the white raft on all sides, threatening to collide. And fifty shades of brown all around: in trees, frozen ground and even water buried under ice.
Wyeth rarely painted self-portraits in the classical sense of the word - literally one, two and missed. He admitted that he preferred to abstract from the objects that he portrayed, especially when it was about himself: “It’s a pity that I can’t write without being present, so that only my hands are there.” Moreover, the artist argued that his creativity was at its peak in those moments when he felt detached or separated from himself. The body reminded of his human existence, and only in isolation from it did his consciousness achieve maximum clarity and creative freedom.
In general, what Wyeth describes strongly resembles dissociation - this is the name of the protective mechanism of the psyche, which protects it from difficult and difficult feelings. In such cases, a person's consciousness seems to be split off from the body, and he begins to perceive what is happening as if from the outside. John Wilmerding in his book "Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic" decoded the artist's tendency to dissociation: “As long as he imagines himself to be a thing or part of a landscape, Wyeth can maintain the fiction that he is an invisible seer. Perhaps that is why he so rarely painted ordinary self-portraits, since for this it was necessary to look in the mirror, thereby destroying his cherished idea of himself as a hidden observer. ".
The author: Natalia Azarenko
