Black Spruce Ledge
To love a painting is to feel that this presence is… not an object but a voice.
~ Andre Malraux ~
Black Spruce Ledge
(Lobstering Off Black Spruce Ledge)
by
N. C. Wyeth
There are times, when words fail to describe the explosion of emotion, which color and brush strokes, from a masters hands, can stir; this is such a time. For me, color draws me into a painting, more so than subject matter. I do love seascapes, but this painting is so much more than a portrait of a Maine fisherman, hard at work checking his lobster trap, as the bobbing buoys remind us that his days work is not yet finished. It was painted on a renaissance panel with egg tempera and oil, in 1941. The medieum most definetly accounts for the imapct of the color, along, of course, with the choices that the artist made.
The clouds and sea are in motion, as the the spruce tower over the scene, stainding guard above the piles of rocks which make up the minor island. Though you may worry about the small fisherman’s boat tipping over, your eyes are nevetheless drawn into the movment created by the brilliant colors – notice the actual array of color on the rocks, the amazing clouds which carry you upwards to a brilliantly blue sky, and this overall feeling of the winds coming from left to right, pushing the subjects of the painting every so slightly.
Newell Convers Wyeth, better known as simply N.C. Wyeth, is today closley associated with having fathered Andrew Wyeth, but during his life (1882-1945) he was an acclaimed illustrator who desperately wanted the time to creat such paintings as Black Spruce Ledge. He often felt that his success, as an illustrater, robbed him of the opportunity to be the artist his son and grandson, Jamie Wyeth, became.
Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed.
~William Blake ~
