Andrew Wyeth Reminds Me of God

I love the amazing and profoundly unique, Andrew Wyeth. Though he died only a few years ago, his presence will always be palpable to those of us who love his paintings and who grew up driving the same roads and observing the same landscapes.

Muted colors characterize his style and the faces of those he paints are captured and recorded forever. It’s as close as I will ever be to Christina Olson and Karl Kuerner. Andrew loved to sit with these friends, talk to them, know them, enjoy their company and in the meantime, preserve the beauty of their souls in a two-dimensional masterpiece.



What is most intriguing about Wyeth is that in many ways he was elusive and impossible to capture. Yet somehow he was unparalleled at taking the mystery of the most ordinary people and capturing their lives with a pose, a paintbrush and a series of sketches. The wrinkles by their eyes, a furrowed brow, the expressions that speak of a hard lived life, the tattered clothes, the sullen stares and the simple rooms in simple homes...

He saw everything. He noticed what the average man would never see. Andrew’s gaze automatically observed a curtain blowing just so, water dripping from a tipped, tin bucket, a strand of wheat pointed a certain way and a drift of snow on a rolling Pennsylvania hill. He, himself, said he could live another 40 lifetimes in Brandywine, PA and never exhaust its beauty. I envy such a mind. To see, to genuinely see beyond what seems so simple and to eventually unveil something so grand. I consider life this way; I think of the glory of God this way. Day upon day passes and we miss the miracles of beauty, the scattered about symbols of His presence. We look right over top the most profound examples of God’s markings and the affirmation of His goodness. Andrew Wyeth saw mystery and striking beauty in the common things. Sounds just like God...He dresses the fields with simple flowers, takes notice of the most regular birds;He picked unschooled men, and described Himself as a Shepherd and His Word as a little seed...

In our hectic, running, spinning lives, we miss Him all the time. We ache for Him and verbalize the frustration that our God appears distant and removed from His people. But we are too distracted to see.  Yet Andrew, and his father before him, took note of hidden treasures and shaped the most priceless paintings from dusty attics, and cold, drab kitchens, making masterpieces out of objects we wander right by. Maybe the God of the universe is concealed in the common. Just maybe the glimpses of Himself will come where we are just not looking. Apparently He is not in the glitter and gold. That was never His mode of entry.

Evening at the Kuerners, one of my favorites.








(Thanks Christina for encouraging me to write when not inspired...)