Christina's World

Christina's World, by Andrew Wyeth, is by far, my favourite work of art. Others come close, which I hope to write about in the future, but for me, Christina's World has always been my favourite ever since I laid eyes on it doing research for an art project at school, learning about American art. I learnt a lot about Edward Hopper, Grant Wood and an obscure naive artist known as Grandma Moses, but Wyeth's Christina's World stood out to me, at first only aesthetically, but then, like with most loved stuff, its meaning and my personal interpretations have been specified, making it extremely special. It is in the book '1001 Paintings to see before you die', and when I saw it there last week, it brought all those meaning back again.

A little about the painting: it was painted in 1948, and the scene is of a real farmhouse in a town called Cushing, in Maine. Around 1999, I was crazy about anything New England, and even had my bedroom decorated to what I thought represented that sort of country interior style. I was reading a lot about the witch hunts also, and loved collecting pictures of the houses and the autumnal scenes of that part of America. The farmhouse in the picture, is now an art centre.

The painting depicts on first look a scene, a field, asymetrically perfect, with the woman or girl in the foreground looking up, ahead, on the grass. Closer inspection shows this woman is struggling and her limbs are thin. The painting technique gives an eery realism to every tiny detail, every blade of grass and every strand of hair, a technique of painting Wyeth mastered which involved controlling the mixing of paints to create very specific colours, giving Christina's World an almost muted tone, which I feel works with not only the theme of struggle, but my feelings towards it.

How did it and how does it still make me feel? Well, it's a self pitying feeling, it represents struggle, and sympathy. It's a beautiful scene but there is woman is crawling towards a house. The juxtaposition of a scene where nothing could go wrong is forcfully confronted with a personal and physical struggle. Wyeth was inspired to paint this because he saw from the farmhouse one day the woman crawling across the field. She had suffered an illness in childhood which had effected her muscle growth and couldn't walk. It must of been a weird thing to see this woman in a dress crawling across the grass, but that's apparently how she got about.

I used to have a print of it and it was stuck on the wall as a poster during uni. Unfortunately for me, it got torn down during a drunken stupor one night when we rolled in and fell against it. I will get it again, and frame it next time, and I will put it in the living room of the next place I move to. It will be to me in my living room as what Monet's 'Poppies Blooming' is to my parent's living room.