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.