{"id":202,"date":"2009-04-06T15:34:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-06T15:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnpicacio.com\/onthefront\/2009\/04\/06\/michaelis-on-n-c-wyeth\/"},"modified":"2014-12-14T18:46:23","modified_gmt":"2014-12-14T18:46:23","slug":"michaelis-on-n-c-wyeth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/johnpicacio.com\/onthefront\/2009\/04\/06\/michaelis-on-n-c-wyeth\/","title":{"rendered":"Michaelis on N.C. Wyeth"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p> $\"\"$ <\/a>Rarely time for pleasure reading here. Most of my reading time is for manuscripts I\u2019m cover-illustrating, or am going to be working on. One exception lately \u2014 David Michaelis\u2019 1998 biography, N.C. WYETH<\/a>. Both pictures seen here are from Wyeth\u2019s classic TREASURE ISLAND work. Some words of wisdom here, courtesy of Michealis, regarding the power of N.C.\u2019s pictures. This passage hit home\u2026\n

Michaelis:<\/span> \u201cWyeth used the medium. In literature, as in films, time advances, stories develop. No single paragraph or frame can tell the whole story. In painting, however, everything is visible all at once. The act of \u2018seeing everything\u2019 in one supreme moment has particular potence in childhood, when it feels possible to experience all of time in one moment. For a child, as for the onlooker of a painting, each single, present moment is the whole story. Past and future do not exist; and if emotions are keyed high enough, a single picture can be felt as an eternity.\u201d<\/p>\n

$\"\"$ <\/a>Michaelis:<\/span> \u201cWyeth\u2019s paintings for TREASURE ISLAND charge the viewer with the danger and excitement of seeing \u2018everything all at once.\u2019 We are not only seeing forbidden things but seeing without being seen<\/span>. We are free to look in on terrible happenings, unnoticed by the objects of our gaze. This is universal fantasy: in picture after picture, we find ourselves in the middle of the action, living among menacing people, without ourselves being menaced. Guns are at hand, knives within reach; in Preparing for the Mutiny<\/span>, one of the cutlasses on the table is held out to us, the hilt almost within our grasp. We are given the erotic power of omnipotent invisibility.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"