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In a rare 2005 interview with the Maine Sunday Telegram, Andrew Wyeth reminisced about his time in Maine and reflected on his career.

By BOB KEYES, Staff Writer January 16, 2009

This story originally appeared in the May 1, 2005, edition of the Maine Sunday Telegram. After learning of Wyeth's death, arts writer Bob Keyes spoke today about his memories of the unexpected phone call from the iconic painter.

Andrew Wyeth never intended to become an icon of the art world.

Now, at 87, the artist known for his romantic images of Maine is witness to a resurgence of national interest in his paintings.

Just as Winslow Homer's rock-and-wave oils capture the stormy Maine coast, Wyeth's paintings of clapboard seaside buildings and boats in motion represent Maine to millions familiar with his work.

In a career noted for accomplishments, 2005 is shaping up as one of Wyeth's most visible, in Maine and in the art world at large.

The High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Philadelphia Museum of Art are organizing a Wyeth retrospective of 100 works, to open this fall.

In Rockland, the Farnsworth Art Museum and Wyeth Study Center are showing more than 50 of his early watercolors, as well as a rotation of Wyeth's tempera works.

This week, the Maine College of Art in Portland will honor him with a lifetime achievement award at its annual Art Honors banquet.

It is a lot of attention for a painter known for his reclusiveness, whose images have been loved by Americans but at times overlooked, or dismissed, by art scholars for their postcard-perfect scenes.

But Wyeth has remained steadfast in his artistic vision. His goal has always been to simply and faithfully represent an image or moment that causes him to catch his breath. He is moved by beauty in nature, of character in man and in the symbolism of material objects, such as an open window or door.

"I paint the things that emotionally mean a lot to me," Wyeth said recently in a rare interview, by telephone from his home in Pennsylvania.

"One goes as far as one's heart takes him. Anything else to me is just a technical trick," he said. "To try to catch something you have seen and lived with, to try to catch that in its excitement and mood, that's the whole excitement of painting to me.

"I just can't make up something. It's got to be something I have felt."

"Christina's World," painted in 1948, is his best-known work. It shows Christina Olson, a neighbor and family friend, crouched, almost seeming to crawl, among the wavy grass of her Cushing home, in the distance atop a slight rise in the hill.

We never see Christina's face, but we sympathize with her struggle, and somehow Wyeth conveys to the viewer the burden of the degenerative muscle disease that kept Olson from walking.

But other images better represent the themes that have endeared him to the masses: a dog sleeping soundly on its master's bed, a curtain fluttering in an open window, a busted brick chimney holding strong against the wind.

At its reductive core, his work is about honesty and integrity.

Now is an appropriate time to study Wyeth's life and work, said Christine Vincent, president of Maine College of Art. The Atlanta and Philadelphia exhibition will elevate his profile, and increasingly art critics are looking admiringly at his career.

For MECA, bestowing the recognition was simply a matter...