← Gone Away
Christina's World
It is still a matter of some wonder to me that I now live upon the Great Plains, the legendary prairie of a thousand Western movies and television shows, the home of the Sioux, the Cheyenne and the Comanche. This land has entered the imagination of all people, not just the Americans. Central Asia has the steppe, a great ocean of grassland, and Africa the dry savannah with its flat-topped thorn trees, but nothing has the appeal to our spirit that resides in that simple phrase, the Great Plains.
Yesterday, I was thinking about how to convey that feeling to someone who has never seen the prairie. It is not enough to say "endless rolling plains, grassland to the horizon and a vast and empty sky." There are other places of which we could say the same. And then I thought of a painting that conveys some of the appeal of the prairie, although that was never its intent.
You will probably have seen this painting; it is the best known of all the paintings by a man I consider to be the greatest American artist: Andrew Wyeth. It is called Christina's World.
I have compressed the file so that it does not take too long to load and the fine detail has been lost as a result. You can see the higher resolution picture if you click here.
Andrew Wyeth was a New Englander and may never have seen the Great Plains, for all I know. If you were able to ask him about this painting, he would tell you that it was about Christina, a crippled girl that he knew and admired for her brave and dogged independence. Knowing this, we notice for the first time the girl's pitifully thin arms and her awkward pose. But that is not what has seized our attention on first seeing the painting; what gives the painting its power is the impression of space that it communicates. The unusual angle from which we view the scene makes the field seem vast and our eyes are drawn inevitably through that space to the horizon.
And see how close to the top of the picture is the horizon and the buildings that crouch upon it. This might have made us feel cramped except that there is the great emptiness of the field before it and the sky above is suggestive of a huge emptiness too. There is nothing upon that skyline that indicates anything other than more empty space beyond.
This is the real magic of the picture; that it gives us that feeling of space and openness. It is what first draws us into the picture and stirs a deep response to the huge emptiness it contains. And only once we have experienced this feeling can we return to the girl, Christina, to wonder at her position in the field and to want to know her story.
Which is exactly what Wyeth intended, of course; he knew full well what he was doing. And he knew, too, that it was not necessary for us ever to hear Christina's story, that his painting would draw from us just the feelings of awe and wonder that he wanted to convey. He has succeeded in communicating to us how he felt about Christina.
It is an entirely accidental by-product that the painting also conveys the sense of prairie. The setting is New England and, were we able to turn around and look elsewhere, we would see the hills and woods and patchwork fields of that countryside. But Wyeth has not allowed us that. He needed the vast emptiness in which to set the girl, to speak of what and who she was.
And that same feeling of space explains far better than I ever could what is meant by the word "prairie".
Yesterday, I was thinking about how to convey that feeling to someone who has never seen the prairie. It is not enough to say "endless rolling plains, grassland to the horizon and a vast and empty sky." There are other places of which we could say the same. And then I thought of a painting that conveys some of the appeal of the prairie, although that was never its intent.
You will probably have seen this painting; it is the best known of all the paintings by a man I consider to be the greatest American artist: Andrew Wyeth. It is called Christina's World.
I have compressed the file so that it does not take too long to load and the fine detail has been lost as a result. You can see the higher resolution picture if you click here.
Andrew Wyeth was a New Englander and may never have seen the Great Plains, for all I know. If you were able to ask him about this painting, he would tell you that it was about Christina, a crippled girl that he knew and admired for her brave and dogged independence. Knowing this, we notice for the first time the girl's pitifully thin arms and her awkward pose. But that is not what has seized our attention on first seeing the painting; what gives the painting its power is the impression of space that it communicates. The unusual angle from which we view the scene makes the field seem vast and our eyes are drawn inevitably through that space to the horizon.
And see how close to the top of the picture is the horizon and the buildings that crouch upon it. This might have made us feel cramped except that there is the great emptiness of the field before it and the sky above is suggestive of a huge emptiness too. There is nothing upon that skyline that indicates anything other than more empty space beyond.
This is the real magic of the picture; that it gives us that feeling of space and openness. It is what first draws us into the picture and stirs a deep response to the huge emptiness it contains. And only once we have experienced this feeling can we return to the girl, Christina, to wonder at her position in the field and to want to know her story.
Which is exactly what Wyeth intended, of course; he knew full well what he was doing. And he knew, too, that it was not necessary for us ever to hear Christina's story, that his painting would draw from us just the feelings of awe and wonder that he wanted to convey. He has succeeded in communicating to us how he felt about Christina.
It is an entirely accidental by-product that the painting also conveys the sense of prairie. The setting is New England and, were we able to turn around and look elsewhere, we would see the hills and woods and patchwork fields of that countryside. But Wyeth has not allowed us that. He needed the vast emptiness in which to set the girl, to speak of what and who she was.
And that same feeling of space explains far better than I ever could what is meant by the word "prairie".