ARTISTS
Every Leaf & Twig: Andrew Wyeth鈥檚 Botanical Imagination
Inspired by a line from Henry David Thoreau鈥檚 1854 book, Walden, or Life in the Woods, Every Leaf & Twig: Andrew Wyeth鈥檚 Botanical Imagination explores the artist鈥檚 lifelong admiration of the influential naturalist and his own sustained engagement with the natural world. Between his birthplace of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and his summers spent in coastal Maine, Wyeth was exposed to two distinct climatic zones鈥攐ne lush and temperate, the other rocky and cool鈥攁nd he found in each a trove of imaginative potential. More visionary than scientific, Wyeth鈥檚 resulting 鈥減lant portraits鈥� are, at times, vaguely anthropomorphic. They also revel in nature鈥檚 organic abstraction and embrace pure pattern and surface, brilliantly capturing the essence of regional flora and the larger environmental networks to which they belong. Examining Wyeth鈥檚 rootedness in the landscapes of Pennsylvania and Maine through an ecocritical lens, Every Leaf & Twig brings together these twin ecosystems and considers the artistic response each inspired.
Featuring nearly 35 works on paper drawn from the holdings of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, many never before seen by the public, Every Leaf & Twig reveals the environmental stakes of Wyeth鈥檚 botanical drawings and watercolors, both as visual records of species and environments threatened by contemporary ecological crises and of his own creative study and stewardship of these fragile鈥攁nd deeply personal鈥攅cosystems.
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Inspired by a line from Henry David Thoreau鈥檚 1854 book, Walden, or Life in the Woods, Every Leaf & Twig: Andrew Wyeth鈥檚 Botanical Imagination explores the artist鈥檚 lifelong admiration of the influential naturalist and his own sustained engagement with the natural world. Between his birthplace of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and his summers spent in coastal Maine, Wyeth was exposed to two distinct climatic zones鈥攐ne lush and temperate, the other rocky and cool鈥攁nd he found in each a trove of imaginative potential. More visionary than scientific, Wyeth鈥檚 resulting 鈥減lant portraits鈥� are, at times, vaguely anthropomorphic. They also revel in nature鈥檚 organic abstraction and embrace pure pattern and surface, brilliantly capturing the essence of regional flora and the larger environmental networks to which they belong. Examining Wyeth鈥檚 rootedness in the landscapes of Pennsylvania and Maine through an ecocritical lens, Every Leaf & Twig brings together these twin ecosystems and considers the artistic response each inspired.
Featuring nearly 35 works on paper drawn from the holdings of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, many never before seen by the public, Every Leaf & Twig reveals the environmental stakes of Wyeth鈥檚 botanical drawings and watercolors, both as visual records of species and environments threatened by contemporary ecological crises and of his own creative study and stewardship of these fragile鈥攁nd deeply personal鈥攅cosystems.
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The exhibition takes its name from a line in 'Walden' and, like that memoir, explores just what a person might get up to alone in the woods.
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