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Lot Essay
Even in the modern age, the passage of the seasons dictates the rhythms of life. Winter especially has long offered artists, from Dutch Old Master Pieter Bruegel the Elder to Impressionist icon Claude Monet and contemporary painter Peter Doig, a rich terrain in which to artistically explore quintessential life cycle themes. A foremost champion of winter in American Art history, Andrew Wyeth’s spare style has lent to a widely celebrated oeuvre of snowy scenery. As with many of his best works, Tracks is a layered composition, exhibiting his unique talent in building landscapes instilled with complex emotional power.
In Tracks, Wyeth captures a crisp winter’s day in the Pennsylvania countryside, wrapping the familiar topography of a hillside above his family home in a smooth, quiet blanket of snow. The artist’s talent as a draughtsman is on full display. A starkly white foreground, only intercepted by a set of deer tracks, leads to the massive gnarled trunk of a dead tree ominously laying across the fresh snow, ahead of a cold, distant landscape obscured by the clime of the day. Exploiting the white of the paper and applying watercolor with an economy of wash, Wyeth creates an almost abstract composition, subtly indicating the snow by the absence of pigment rather than painting in its details. More intricate foliage on the trees beyond the trunk and the bushes at right provides texture and liveliness to the composition. This contrast, together with the deer, lends warmth to this hauntingly poetic portrait of place and time.
While certainly beautifully executed, in Tracks Wyeth eschews an idealistic rendition of winter, captivated instead by the emotional impact that being snowed-in can have on the human condition, triggering feelings of loneliness, nostalgia and remembrance. Wyeth once commented, “I love the bleakness of winter and snow and get a thrill out of the chill. I'm taken by the bleakness—not the melancholy of the feeling of snow. My winter scenes differ from those of other artists in that they're not romantic. No! They capture that marvelous, lonely bleakness, the quiet shrill reality of winter.” (as quoted in Andrew Wyeth Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Nagoya, Japan, 1995, p. 245)
Wyeth’s Tracks can therefore also be seen as a personal reflection on the artist’s own emotions, perhaps thinking back with bittersweet nostalgia on the untimely death of his father, the illustrious illustrator N.C. Wyeth. This loss had an immense impact on his life and art, and Anne Classen Knutson has observed, “At the age of twenty-eight, his youthful optimism and sense of immortality were abruptly derailed, and his work began to reflect an increasing mortality…His father’s death had brought him to life, Wyeth said, since it caused him to commit to serious themes. ‘It gave me reason to paint, and emotional reason. I think it made me.’” (Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic, p. 58)
Tracks lingers between happy memories and snow-covered desolation, a distant home seemingly frozen in time within the winter landscape. As a result, the image evokes a persisting mystery—challenging the viewer to explore their own emotions associated with nostalgic memories of winters past. Following in Wyeth’s footsteps, contemporary painter Peter Doig has famously embraced snow with similar purpose, drawing the viewer into his winter compositions to inspire retrospection. Doig has explained, “I began to use snow as a metaphor for looking back, you know, the way it's often used as a visual code to recall another, better time.” (as quoted in “Mr. Doig's feeling for snow,” The Irish Times, June 28, 2000) In both Doig’s and Wyeth’s work, their mesmerizing winter imagery evokes personal meditations, stirring feelings in each individual viewer that allow paintings such as Tracks to leave a meaningful and lasting impression.
In Tracks, Wyeth captures a crisp winter’s day in the Pennsylvania countryside, wrapping the familiar topography of a hillside above his family home in a smooth, quiet blanket of snow. The artist’s talent as a draughtsman is on full display. A starkly white foreground, only intercepted by a set of deer tracks, leads to the massive gnarled trunk of a dead tree ominously laying across the fresh snow, ahead of a cold, distant landscape obscured by the clime of the day. Exploiting the white of the paper and applying watercolor with an economy of wash, Wyeth creates an almost abstract composition, subtly indicating the snow by the absence of pigment rather than painting in its details. More intricate foliage on the trees beyond the trunk and the bushes at right provides texture and liveliness to the composition. This contrast, together with the deer, lends warmth to this hauntingly poetic portrait of place and time.
While certainly beautifully executed, in Tracks Wyeth eschews an idealistic rendition of winter, captivated instead by the emotional impact that being snowed-in can have on the human condition, triggering feelings of loneliness, nostalgia and remembrance. Wyeth once commented, “I love the bleakness of winter and snow and get a thrill out of the chill. I'm taken by the bleakness—not the melancholy of the feeling of snow. My winter scenes differ from those of other artists in that they're not romantic. No! They capture that marvelous, lonely bleakness, the quiet shrill reality of winter.” (as quoted in Andrew Wyeth Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Nagoya, Japan, 1995, p. 245)
Wyeth’s Tracks can therefore also be seen as a personal reflection on the artist’s own emotions, perhaps thinking back with bittersweet nostalgia on the untimely death of his father, the illustrious illustrator N.C. Wyeth. This loss had an immense impact on his life and art, and Anne Classen Knutson has observed, “At the age of twenty-eight, his youthful optimism and sense of immortality were abruptly derailed, and his work began to reflect an increasing mortality…His father’s death had brought him to life, Wyeth said, since it caused him to commit to serious themes. ‘It gave me reason to paint, and emotional reason. I think it made me.’” (Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic, p. 58)
Tracks lingers between happy memories and snow-covered desolation, a distant home seemingly frozen in time within the winter landscape. As a result, the image evokes a persisting mystery—challenging the viewer to explore their own emotions associated with nostalgic memories of winters past. Following in Wyeth’s footsteps, contemporary painter Peter Doig has famously embraced snow with similar purpose, drawing the viewer into his winter compositions to inspire retrospection. Doig has explained, “I began to use snow as a metaphor for looking back, you know, the way it's often used as a visual code to recall another, better time.” (as quoted in “Mr. Doig's feeling for snow,” The Irish Times, June 28, 2000) In both Doig’s and Wyeth’s work, their mesmerizing winter imagery evokes personal meditations, stirring feelings in each individual viewer that allow paintings such as Tracks to leave a meaningful and lasting impression.