Andrew Wyeth's Campfire

(C) 2015 Dale DiMauro

In twelve days my cast will be cut off, freeing me to be truly active again! Yea!!! Again yea!!! For those of you unaware of my condition, I broke my left wrist in the beginning of February, in not one but two places. Fortunately, it was reset expertly at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, here in Vermont, in the emergency room. It was reset so well that no surgery was required! It has progressed to the point where I played two matches of racquetball recently. After weeks of minimal activity I was desperate for exercise. I even have a handsome blue cast, in the cerulean blue color range. The nurse offered a swatch of colors to choose from as if selecting wallpaper patterns!

In the meantime, our living room is littered with pencil drawings of faces, figures and feet. I even have a little portrait of my wife. Since my stamina was limited, I did a small knock off of an Andrew Wyeth's painting called Campfire. Many artist friends who live in New England, I find, have a book or two of Andrew Wyeth. Well, I have one called The Helga Pictures, published in 1987 with much controversy to follow, but I won't go into that here. I like this painting because it is direct, abstract, and applied with wet washes. It is even understood that Wyeth used a straw and blew air to create the nodules and uneven edges on the branches in his picture. 

I find the sky in Andrew Wyeth's watercolors to be of particular interest. There is a lot of atmosphere in his sky with little pigment used. This sky is warm in temperature, using a small amount of yellow or even a drop or two of red into a wet wash.

I had a square watercolor block kicking around that I think has perfect proportions for doing little portraits. It is small in size so as not to allow for too much detail, yet the sheet enables me to get the essence of the scene. I only focused on one area of Wyeth's painting, which included the backside of Helga, the model's head. I was interested in mixing colors to match what he might have used, with techniques he may have applied. However, I did not use a straw in this case, even though I have tried in the past because, I failed to consider it at the time.