“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”
-Andrew Wyeth
Damp gray mists and yellow grasses, denuded branches lacing smoldering skies: November has its own bare-bones charm for the artist with a willing eye.
The greatest of these November-inspired paintings is surely Andrew Wyeth’s November First. In this desolated cornfield Wyeth gives us the merciless cycle of life itself, as written in the raw book of a Nature, a nonfiction story that apparently doesn’t include us except perhaps as a footnote.
“Depicting tattered cornstalks in a harvested field, November First captures the cold damp of late autumn, portraying the inevitable cycles of decay and renewal,” says the Smithsonian Museum, which owns the picture. “Wyeth steadfastly maintained his dedication to painting the people and places that were familiar to him in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and Cushing, Maine. The cornfield shown in this watercolor was located near his studio in Chadds Ford, behind the house of Dr. Margaret Handy, the pediatrician who cared for Wyeth’s two children.”
To be sure, great landscapes transcend place. However, it is tempting to imagine Wyatt glancing sidelong at the withered field near his house while walking a sick child to the doctor’s door.
