I had not been working at the Daily Local News for very long when the managing editor, Bob “Shoe” Shoemaker, handed me an assignment that struck me as impossible. I had to get in touch with Andrew Wyeth and record his comments on some or other award he was set to receive.
I looked at Shoe with the sort of look that reporters give their editors when their editors tell them to do something that any person with half a functioning brain should know is just not ever going to happen. “Get Sandra Day O’Connor on the phone and ask her how she’s going to rule in that anti-abortion case? Sure, chief, but first let me turn this lump of coal into the Hope Diamond. I’ll get back to you.”
But Shoe was adamant. I needed to get Andy on the horn ASAP. How in the world was I ever to do that, I asked. “Look him up in the phone book. He’s listed,” Shoe told me.
No way. No how. Can’t be, were my first three reactions -- the only ones printable here in a family newspaper. This is the guy with his own museum, for pity sakes. This is the man who created “Christina’s World,” the masterwork that had hung on my wall as a teenager in
But I did what I was told and picked up the phone book and looked under the “W’s.” And there he was, in black type, Wyeth A, somewhere between “Wyerman” and “Wygent.” And so I picked up the phone and dialed (remember, this is the mid-1980s and the ever cost conscious DLN, and yes, we did still have rotary phones) his number. It rang, someone picked up the other end, I asked for Andrew Wyeth, and he said, “Speaking.”
I thought of that day and that call Friday, or course, when the news came that Andy died in his sleep at age 91. You might be excused for thinking it fitting for him to pass away in his sleep, since the “removal into dreams,” as one critic I read put it, had so much to do with his work. I think primarily of “Night Sleeper,” the wonderful study of Wyeth’s dog, Nell Gwyn, lying on a sofa, her head pressed against a pillow and the moonlit Brinton’s Mill in the background, a painting that he said had come to him on a nocturnal walk about his home.
Or “Master Bedroom,” another of a dog fast asleep, this time on a large bed with a white bedspread and a pale blue sky through an ancient window. And finally, “Spring,” the wonderful landscape of an old man lying in a field while the snow melts around him and brings him back to the world of the living. Sleep is where magic can occur in our everyday worlds as we remove ourselves into dreams, and the best of Wyeth’s works were nothing short of magic.
I am sorry that Andy had to die, but also a bit relieved that he did. I think his beloved world around Chadds Ford and the Brandywine Creek valley has lost a bit of the character he captured, and don’t know whether its move into the modern world disturbed him the way it disturbs me. I love the dry brush painting, “Roasted Chestnut,” but its view of a youth on a dirt road selling that particular treat does not strike me as a scene one would find along the back byways of Chester County today.
I once wrote that there must be a category somewhere in the register of Chester County Citizenship Requirements that dictates that you have to have at least one Andrew Wyeth Moment in your life if you are to truly count yourself among the truly blessed. That is, a time when you, or someone close to you, have a brush with the most famous painter ever to eat at Hank’s Place on Route One. I’ve had my share over the years, including the aforementioned telephone call, but my last one didn’t involve meeting or seeing or talking with Andy.
My friend Julia and I visited Andy’s family home, there off
I didn’t move to
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