Just some thoughts and ideas going around in my head while trying to figure out where I am and where everyone else is going.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Mine and Christina's World

Since I don't believe in deleting stuff that I put up, I need to do more than the two line entry of my last post. And so to cover it...Andrew Wyeth died last week.

I had heard the name before and had assumed that Andrew Wyeth was an artist, although I had no idea what he done and thought,"wasn’t he dead already?” Apparently he wasn't, not until last week when he passed away at 91.

He was a painter who lived in Chadds Ford just outside of Philadelphia and he was known for painting scenes in Pennsylvania and Maine and just using two or three models over and over again in his portraits. I saw on the news that one of these models was Christina Olson. And then they showed the painting Christina’s World and I was transported back.



I remember when I was 12 or 13, we were shown this picture in class, English or Art or something else I don’t really remember which, but we had to write about what we thought was going on in the picture and what had happened before. I don’t know what I wrote, probably nothing because it looked like nothing was happening. But I do remember at the end of the class when the teacher discussed what the some of us had written and what he thought.

He brought up the theory that maybe the woman in the painting had just woken up in the field and was now staring at an empty house from which a sudden and mysterious noise had come from. Or maybe she was crippled, to you young PC folks that would be physically challenged, and that she was calling out for help from someone. These were the two theories that I remember, but more importantly, that was when I started to wonder why I could think of stuff like that, especially since there didn’t seem to be a right or even a wrong answer.

Of course many years later I found out that Christina was real and was in fact an invalid and that the teacher probably wasn’t the Sherlock Holmes of secondary education as I thought he was. But more than that, maybe because of that, I had learned to ask questions of myself and others. Sometimes they won’t be the right questions or even the questions that will give me that answer that I looking for. But they will be the ones that I can use to explore and discover new areas of thought and ideas that are foreign to me or the ones that will question my own beliefs.

Thus if you have ever thought that I asked too many damn questions, which some of the nearest and dearest have accused me of and have actually turned their backs on me while I ask them, then you have only Andrew Wyeth to blame for that.

11 comments:

  1. I might have thought that her secret lover left her in the middle of the field after breaking her heart.

    You can see the tire tracks in the field.

    She looks like she is reaching after someone.. please don't leave me!!

    lol - I kid, but really...that's kinda what it looks like.

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  2. well I dont know about waking up ..but when I look at this picture I see a women that has fallen and cant get up...hahaha

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  3. RunningMom - I guess that's what good art is all about. It's supposed to make you think and if you can relate to it with your thoughts and or experiences then I reckon so much the better.

    Oyin - You watch too much TV.

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  4. anna mae was runnin for her life. she caught sight of shelter and lost focus of her path and ber skinty behind fell and broke her foot. now she tryin to get there but cant move! so she lifts her hand in despair!

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  5. lmao @ oyin
    i think u can never ask too many questions

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  6. fuzzy - I am starting to be amazed by the way people interpret this painting. I wonder if perhaps everyone is actually just reflecting their own situations or at least one that they are familiar with. Maybe I should have written this piece differently and gone for a more of a social experimental aspect.


    Torrence - Yes, there can never be too many questions if you are looking for the truth otherwise how will you know it when you see it.

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  7. For some strange reason, when I look at this painting, I see Scarlett O'Hara from Gone with the Wind.

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  8. You are so intelligent, sure hope that you are meeting people that can meet your wit, intelligence and they had better be cultured (must have the ability to discuss art intelligently).

    The maiden in the picture appears to have travelled during the night growing tired and napped later waking to discover a house. Now she has a feeling of freedom and a sense of security.

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  9. NAMja - Why Cap'n Butler, I don't what you mean by that. Unless of course there is a feeling of longing that you get just as Scarlett longed for Tara or Ashley Wilkes.


    Chet - Freedom and security, now there's something you don't ususally hear together in the same sentence in this War on Terror day and age, st least not when people are speaking of society as a whole. But I would think that you must have found it or are finding it on a personal level and that is something to strive for.

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  10. When I was a kid my parents had the painting in our home and I remember being fascinated by just the details in her hands. Back in July a Vegas newspaper ran this AP article, and I saved it and gave it to my mom when I saw her last month. It's about the farmhouse being added to the National History Registry, but has a lot more info about Wyeth and Christina in it.

    http://www.edgelasvegas.com/index.php?ch=style&sc=home&sc3=&id=122321

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  11. Tyge - Ha! So it wasn't really Christina after all, just the idea or memory of her. I guess it goes to show that Gilda Radner was right, "There's always something."

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