It is late July. An exciting shipment of watercolor paintings by Andrew Wyeth, being lent from the Wyeth Center in Rockland, Maine, have just arrived. The excitement stems from the fact that the works are from Mrs. Andrew Wyeth’s private collection at the Center and seldom leave Maine. They have rarely been shown in Chadds Ford.

These paintings will be featured in the Brandywine Museum of Art’s upcoming exhibition, Natural Selections: Andrew Wyeth Plant Studies opening August 29, 2015. The exhibition was planned and approved last year, and loan requests for paintings and their arrangement in the gallery were finalized in the spring. Now, the installation of the paintings is only a few weeks away. Just one painting remains to be picked-up by museum staff from a private collection for preparation and hanging.

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Exploring the Depth

Here, museum preparator Stephen Ruszkowski, Mary Landa, collection manager of the Andrew Wyeth Office and I have removed the shipping materials. We are examining each painting to ensure they have traveled safely and to measure them for matting and framing for the exhibition. 

Because these are works that we have not exhibited before, we take extra time, without the barrier of framing, to enjoy the direct sensory experience of the artist’s tonal range of pencil lines on the paper surface and colorful washes of paint that has been absorbed into its fibers, giving much depth of character to his work. 

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So Many Details

In addition to Wyeth’s freely expressed washes of watercolor, the curators also observe Wyeth’s expertise in handling the drybrush method to create his images. Drybrush is a method that artists use in which the artist squeezes excess water from the brush before picking up moistened watercolors. Wyeth used drybrush to draw details in fine lines with the brush tip, or drag the brush fibers across the paper to create textural effects. 

As a final step, our team searches for any reference notes the artist made to refer to when creating his final painting, and, in the case of one of the works, to look at the drawing or painting he made on the reverse side that will not be seen in the exhibition. 

Nature Through Wyeth’s Imagination

When the exhibition opens, visitors will see Wyeth’s sense of discovery and in twenty–four drawings in pencil and watercolor. In some studies the artist chose to draw parts rather than its entire form.  Even with such fragmentary views, Wyeth rendered objects in precise, almost scientific description.

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See For Yourself

Natural Selections: Andrew Wyeth Plant Studies will be the second in a series of focused exhibitions at the Brandywine River Museum of Art on the work of Andrew Wyeth.  These exhibitions complement our Andrew Wyeth gallery in which many iconic temperas and watercolors created by the artist over his seven-decade career are shown. The exhibition will run August 29, 2015 – January 31, 2016, ample time to savor and be inspired by a rare view of a master artist’s creative process and brilliant observations of nature’s beauty. We look forward to your visit, click for more information about seeing the exhibition or to purchase tickets.