Master Bedroom
My favorite Wyeth dog painting, and one much beloved by his fans, is Master Bedroom. The unadorned room and the grey tones coupled with the warmth of the sunlit shadow and the cozy dog project an astonishing warmth for a painting that borders on melancholy.
His critics, who have diminished over the span of his career, pegged his style as Realism and called it sentimental. I completely disagree. I see it as soulful. Wyeth called it "thoughtful."
And, I am not even sure the category of Realism applies to his work. Yes, his paintings depict realistic subjects, ones he stayed true to as the 20th century Pop Art start dug into abstraction, but spend some time with his paintings and you'll see the surreality of his world come through, from the dazzling effect light can have on a newspaper left on the ground, to the complexity of what it means to be alone with one's thoughts. Yes, Wyeth captured the daily life of simple Americans, but through the brilliance of his brushstrokes and mastery of composition, he showed us that nothing is more surreal than life itself.
The Intuder
Ides of March
If these paintings or Wyeth's name are not familiar to you, you probably know him by his most famous painting:
Christina's World
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