Andrew Wyeth
Editors save my hide all the time. I put a lot of words down, and they don’t always make sense. This story about the centennial of Andrew Wyeth’s birth became a discussion about American rural life, our romantic, nostalgic memories and the reputation of an American art icon with deep and vital ties to Maine.
But it wasn’t always that. When I first filed the Wyeth story, it was a mess – page after page of words that fit nicely together but didn’t do much more than rehash what everybody already knew.
My editor at the time, Chelsea Conaboy, called me on it, and suggested ways to improve the story.
She pushed me to broaden my sources, to take it beyond art-scholar and museum circles and include the voices of cultural observers who could talk about Wyeth’s place and context. That’s where writer and part-time Mainer Christina Baker-Kline came in. Her novel at the time, “A Piece of the World,” imagined the real-life of Christina Olson of Cushing, a frequent Wyeth model and subject of his most popular painting, “Christina’s World.”
Baker Kline was an obvious source in some ways, but Chelsea was instrumental in helping me to rethink how to handle her material. She wanted me to emphasize the attention being paid to rural America in politics and art by the modern homesteading movement. I went back through my notes and recast the story to emphasize and expand those themes, and I introduced Baker Kline as a key source up near the top instead of midway down, where I had her before.
I kept the art scholars and museum types in the story, but I was able to place Wyeth’s art in contemporary cultural context because of Baker Kline. She wrote about Wyeth’s world in her novels and knew it from visiting the Olson House with her family as a child. She was the perfect source – a big thinker with local credibility and a national perspective.
The story ran on the front page of the Maine Sunday Telegram on April 9, 2017, just as five Wyeth exhibitions in Maine were opening. It was one of two stories I submitted for consideration by the judges of the Rabkin Prize after I learned I had been nominated. It represents so much of what I strive to do with my art writing, which is giving people a pathway in and then offering jumping-off points where they can take deep dives and explore the layers.
Good editors are essential to the process. I wrote a rambling story that was full of facts but lacked soul. Chelsea’s editing and suggestions turned it into a front-page story about an often-misunderstood Maine artist. I’ve benefited from several exceptional editors over the years. Chelsea pushed me toward big-picture ideas.
Linda Fullerton, a former editor at the Press Herald, always talked about telling a specific story and not getting bogged down trying to be a completist. Jon Walker, an editor in South Dakota, preached word economy, precision and cadence. He’s also the one who taught me to read my stories aloud. If the words don’t flow naturally, rewrite them until they do.
As for the subject of this story, Andrew Wyeth has always been important to me. I hung a print of his egg tempera painting “Northern Point” in my college dorm room in Georgia, because it reminded me of Maine. It’s an image of a wood-shingled roof of a beach house, the shingles mottled and cracked. A glass-ball lightning rod breaks up the geometry of the pitched roof and leads the eye across a grassy field to a curving beach in the distance. The painting pulled me back at my family’s house in Phippsburg. It made me feel wistful, nostalgic and inspired.
I interviewed Andrew Wyeth just once, by phone, when he received an award from Maine College of Art. I was thrilled with the chance to talk to someone I considered to be an art hero. I was disappointed he didn’t invite me out for an interview in person, but was pleased with our conversation and grateful that he called. Along with John Marin, Wyeth represented a pathway into Maine art that I followed from a very young age. When he died, I wrote his obituary.
I’m grateful to do this job at this time in the history of Maine art. I’ve met and become friends with many wonderful artists, who have almost always been kind and generous with their time and wisdom. I’ve had dinner with David Driskel and Will Barnet, who, when he was 101 and I turning 50, told me to enjoy my 50s because they would be best decade of my life. He was right.
Ashley Bryan introduced me to a Dark and Stormy at the Isleford Dock Restaurant and made me stay for a second so I could experience what he promised would be the most dramatic sunset of my life. He was right, too.
And Dahlov Ipcar always took my calls. “Oh no,” she would say when she realized it was me who was calling. “Who died?” When she died in her 100th year, I wrote her obituary. I’ve reported a lot of stories about Maine artists who have died. I’ve only cried for Dahlov Ipcar.
I feel a responsibility to tell their stories well and completely. For all they have given us, it’s the least I can do.
