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Sunday, April 18, 2004
What a wonderful World
Your thin end for today:
I was always visually and graphically inclined, and when I was 15 Mum bought me an art book with pictures of famous works of art included in it. Among them was a picture of a woman in a pink dress sitting in a paddock of grass, just outside a brighter lit area with an old house sitting on the top of the hill. For some reason I was always drawn to this picture. I wondered every time I saw it why she didn't sit within the brighter circle; why her whole body seemed to beckon to the haven of the farmhouse; why she was alone. It was always my mystery picture, well one of them.
Even though I forgot the authors's name, I never forgot the name of the painting - "Christina's World". This famous 20th Century painting was by an American painter, Andrew Wyeth (1917 - ), and the subject was a Maine woman named Christina Olsen (1893 - 1968). The original painting, which now lives in the New York Museum of Modern Art was described as "a haunting portrait by Andrew Wyeth of a crippled woman and a forsaken house on a bleak New England hill…that would become one of the most popular paintings ever done by an American."
Except for the last two months of her life, she lived her entire life in the house on the hill in the painting. The short version of the meaning of the painting is that by age 53, Christina Olsen, increasingly disabled her whole life by an unknown but suspected degenerative disorder, could no longer walk and refused to use a wheelchair. In 1948 Wyeth sketched Christina as she crawled down the hill to visit her parent's graves. The dress she wears in the painting is one she made and wore at her nephew's wedding a few years earlier.
This was Christina's World.
Today, it looks like this
More about the 18th Century sea captain's house HERE.
After 25 years, all my questions are answered. Lucky I got more paintings and artists that fascinate me to delve into yet.
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I was always visually and graphically inclined, and when I was 15 Mum bought me an art book with pictures of famous works of art included in it. Among them was a picture of a woman in a pink dress sitting in a paddock of grass, just outside a brighter lit area with an old house sitting on the top of the hill. For some reason I was always drawn to this picture. I wondered every time I saw it why she didn't sit within the brighter circle; why her whole body seemed to beckon to the haven of the farmhouse; why she was alone. It was always my mystery picture, well one of them.
Even though I forgot the authors's name, I never forgot the name of the painting - "Christina's World". This famous 20th Century painting was by an American painter, Andrew Wyeth (1917 - ), and the subject was a Maine woman named Christina Olsen (1893 - 1968). The original painting, which now lives in the New York Museum of Modern Art was described as "a haunting portrait by Andrew Wyeth of a crippled woman and a forsaken house on a bleak New England hill…that would become one of the most popular paintings ever done by an American."
Except for the last two months of her life, she lived her entire life in the house on the hill in the painting. The short version of the meaning of the painting is that by age 53, Christina Olsen, increasingly disabled her whole life by an unknown but suspected degenerative disorder, could no longer walk and refused to use a wheelchair. In 1948 Wyeth sketched Christina as she crawled down the hill to visit her parent's graves. The dress she wears in the painting is one she made and wore at her nephew's wedding a few years earlier.
This was Christina's World.
Today, it looks like this
More about the 18th Century sea captain's house HERE.
After 25 years, all my questions are answered. Lucky I got more paintings and artists that fascinate me to delve into yet.
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