Bo Bartlett

Speaker I grew up in Georgia. And didn’t know much about art, you know, there was a small museum, but otherwise there wasn’t much art around.

Speaker So the only art that I knew was art that came into the house in the cover of magazines, you know, Saturday Evening Post and Norman Rockwell or Life and look magazines where there was some and Andrew Wyeth articles. So that’s the only way I knew what, you know, art was or contemporary art was. And there was also Salvador Dali and Picasso and things like that. But and maybe Jackson Pollock. But it was it was the way I thought really I connected with because it just had a resonance for me, even as a small child. So basically, I grew up liking Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth. Then as I got later on in high school, my one of my English teachers gave me my name is Asher Lev, which is a book by. And what Asher left does is Asher goes off to to Florence to study art. So I didn’t know any better. I was 18 and didn’t know what to do, so I just did what the fictional character and she left it. So I went to Florence and I was in Florence. I was studying, you know, just drawing at the feet and drawing, you know, sculptures, Michelangelo’s David and stuff. And I met some of the expatriate painters there and been long. I studied with Ben Long, who taught me how to draw over about five months. He just sat me down in front of a route or a skull and just had me draw these things where it was just learning patience, really. And just to see that was and he was studying with Pietro Antigoni at the time. So the time came when I had to go back to America and I was asking around who I might be able to study with when I went back to America so that the expatriate painters there, several of them, one day we were in a restaurant and they gave me a list and I started writing it down and they gave me a list of maybe about 10, 10 realist painters in America at the time. So this was the early 70s. So there were not a lot of people practicing representational painting, realistic painting in America at that time. So this was that was about that short. And Andrew Wyeth was on the top of the list. And there were there were others down not far below that that I was also interested in. And some I knew and some I didn’t know. But so when I came back to America, I was in Georgia and I when I moved to Philadelphia, one of the reasons I moved to Philadelphia, I got accepted actually in Philadelphia College of Art. But also one of the reasons I moved there was because Andrew Wyeth was there and just outside Philadelphia. So I shortly after I arrived, I called information for oneone and I asked, you know, like Andrew Wyeth, please. And they gave me his phone number and I called Andrew Wyeth on the phone. And I remember it well, he he picked up the phone and you could hear the dishes washing in the background behind him. They were in the kitchen there at the meal, I suppose. And you could hear that that’s was washing dishes in the sink. And they were sort of talking as he was also talking to me. And I said, you know, I’m Bookmarklet, I want to study with you. And he was like, oh, I don’t take students, but you can come out tomorrow and come visit me. So I, I borrowed a friend’s car, you know, I only had a bike. I was eighteen and I so I borrowed this car and I drove out to Chatsworth and I went to Hanks’ at the corner of one Route 100, and I asked where Andrew Wyeth lived. And so they, you know, send me a mile down Route 100 to to the house, to the mill. And I go up and I, you know, real long hair and a beard and I look like Rasputin or somebody or Tolstoy or someone. And I go up and I knock on the wooden door, you know, that wouldn’t have to work. Knock on the door and Betsy opens the top happened and she looks at sort of frightened and sort of terrifying looking young figure. And and I and I say, I came here to see Andrew. I have a meeting. I have an appointment.

Speaker And she said, he’s not here and I don’t know where he is.

Speaker And she sort of closed the door and chased me off. And I was, you know, I was eighteen. I was very vulnerable and I didn’t know how things worked in the world.

Speaker And I was just like, oh, you know, I’ve been like, rebuffed, you know, like we had a meeting and he didn’t show up. And so what I didn’t know was that his studio was on the other side, fruit one, you know, just a few blocks behind the brand new one. And that I missed that that meeting because I didn’t know the right place. If I got in the studio, I would have met him. Then we would have hung out and no telling what would have happened. But I instead I went back to Philadelphia and went to the Insane Academy of Fine Art and studied privately with Nelson Shanks and some others. And and so I I learned to paint more the way that I did, the way that I think. And so while I was at the Pennsylvania Academy, I, Andrew Wyeth, came to the school several times, it was it was the 70s and Jamie and Jamie had a show, Jamie White had a show at the Pennsylvania Academy at that time. Andrew had had a one person show in the 60s there. And so Andy was around. They were the People Club, which was a little restaurant downstairs on Chestnut Street, which is now that was the Belgravia Hotel. But it was the playhouse back then. And that’s all the students had studios there. And Andy, someone someone can run right down the hall. Each student had private studios. And so I was in my studios at one time, had been hotel rooms. So there were nice big, you know, their bathrooms and everything. So weren’t someone’s running down the halls and Andrew’s downstairs and he was downstairs.

Speaker And the teachers had told us at the time not to like Wyeth, like the teachers at the Pennsylvania Academy had taught us that he was just at best perhaps a good draftsman, that he wasn’t a real artist. Real painters paint and a painter. Liwei And you know, at the time, most of the painters at the Pennsylvania Academy were abstract painters, more abstract expressionist type painters, as well as the whole art trend at the time was throughout the whole art world. And so but I had I’d still admired why. And so I went running down stairs and found that he was going into the pool club next door, going in with Jamie and some other people. And and I ran up to him and sort of forced my way into the crowd and say, Mr. Wyeth, Mr. Wyeth, I bogart that I love your work and shake shake his hand. And then I go straight up to upstairs and to my studio in the hallway. There’s a there’s a phone, a payphone. I take out a quarter and I call my mom down in Georgia.

Speaker And she reminded me of years later because I forgot she and she said that I said I’ll never wash my hands again because I remember the way he grabbed it with it back then. He still had that, you know, his hand was real small and tight from from the.

Speaker That ailment is a version of carpal tunnel. It’s something that like as well, I gave it to certain people get that sort of closes up real small. So when he grabbed my hand, he sort of grabbed it like that. I remember it so clearly, but I promised I’d never wash my hands again. So then I went on and graduated from Pennsylvania Academy and Art School in Philadelphia was very small, you know, as opposed to if I’d gone to New York and I had children. So the reason I was in Philadelphia was because I could go to a good school and they had a yard and it just felt ergonomic. And for me and I loved art history there. But when I graduated from Pennsylvania Academy, I had some success in Philadelphia and.

Speaker I was probably of the mind at that time that having been indoctrinated by the Pennsylvania Academy, that Wyeth was a good draftsman but not a great artist. So I’d sort of been brainwashed, isn’t the right word, but taught and but I went on and made my way and got got a gallery in New York and I slowly started to show in New York and had more and more success. And then. At one point I was having a show, I think it was 1991.

Speaker That I had a show that got a negative review and The New York Times.

Speaker And it was you know, it was hard because you’re reading it and it’s like the worst review you’ve ever read. And then it’s you realize it’s your review.

Speaker But sometime later, I got a call from the wires and apparently they’ve seen the review. And whether they knew of my work or not, I’m not sure at that point. I had some small renown around Philadelphia, but it’s hard to say. But what I what they did do was they called me and they invited me out to transform.

Speaker When I learned was that they were often very supportive of young artists and very supportive of people that they wanted to encourage. And Betsy sort of took them on as projects. I didn’t know that at the time, but I was in the process of becoming a project, I think. So we’re we’re looking at my catalog and they’re looking and I am being so polite and so nice. And then but I was still a little bit of the mindset of, you know, Andrew Wyeth’s, you know, with childhood heroes. I was great to meet him, but he’s not like a great artist. And that’s he’s looking at it and she sees, oh, I see here in your your bio that she’s very thorough, like an eagle eye. And she says, I see here in your bio that you went to the film school.

Speaker And I said, yeah, I went to New York Academy. I mean, I went to I’m sorry. I went to.

Speaker NYU, New York University.

Speaker Yeah, I would invite you to film and I antisense here, it says I went to NYU and so she’s saying, oh, you make films. And I say, Yeah, but I had not ever really made a film before. I just made those shorts in school. And so she said, well, I want to make a film on Andrew Wood.

Speaker Would you help me? And I’m like, Yeah, I’ll definitely help you. Mainly because because of the bad review, New York Times paintings is a step. So so I needed to do something. And and, you know, being a painter for for ten years or maybe 15 years.

Speaker But I had not been to a point where paintings weren’t selling.

Speaker So all of a sudden I was able to move into a white world and for the longest time that we rented a big Steenbeck. And so we were we were looking at old footage, old eight. Mm mm. We were looking all these all the footage from everything that had been done. And I remember very clearly one day I was sitting there looking at some footage which had some of Andy’s paintings on it. It was from our CBS Sunday Morning or something like that, one of the CBS programs. And I’m looking at this footage and I think that’s how we worked when she first hired me. We worked every day together in the schoolhouse in Jansport, and she was over at the desk doing some you know, Betsy was incredible. She she made all the books. She made all the films. I mean, she made curated all the exhibitions. I mean, Andrew Wyeth would not be Andrewartha Betsy. He he would just be a painter painting paintings out in the fields. And, you know, no one would know of him and who he was, but she was the one that was very strict on him and very forced him to, as she would say, work on it until it couldn’t be better. And I think that charged him because he painted for her especially early on, so he would bring a painting home and show it to her proudly and hang it on the wall in the middle, and they would work on a title together for days or evenings when they would both be back home from work. But anyway, so that Betsey was sitting behind me working on something, she had three by five cards on the table and she was really working on the next book, whereas it was I was over here reviewing footage and I remember the day clearly.

Speaker I was looking at this painting on the on the film, on the screen, and I thought it’s a pretty good painting.

Speaker Went on to the next one. That’s a good morning to. To the next painting. Damn, that’s a really good painting.

Speaker And slowly, slowly, I got deprogrammed by just looking at the paintings, looking at the work and realizing that what I’ve been taught wasn’t true, that he actually is a master painter.

Speaker These paintings are great paintings. And so I had to relearn it on my own. And I got an indoctrinated and said, well, you get reincarnated.

Speaker So I got. Just my eyes were opened, the scales fell off my eyes and I was able to see clearly that these were great paintings again, and then it was like I started looking at all of this incredible. He’s a great painter. And I just just then I was suddenly turned on and, like, charged and I got it. And I was in wholeheartedly, even though it was unpopular to like, wait, why was it so quiet?

Speaker Well. Martina Hamilton was a gallery owner. Maybe she still is a gallery owner in New York. There was there was a gallery in New York who. Had an artist, Odden Airdrome from Europe, who was coming over to America back in the 80s, who was just starting to get popular in America at that time, he was on the cover of Art News and they did a big story on him. I think Art in America did a story. And I think that the story goes from this colorist that she was with him when they were doing the interviews and they asked Najem who his favorite painters were.

Speaker And he said, well, Andrew Wyeth. And the review were stopped and she said, excuse me, don’t say that I won’t say anything, I won’t write that down. Now, who else?

Speaker So it just in the art world, Andrew Wyeth was thought of as a sort of a. Regionalist or sort of a downhome painter at the time, and maybe just the populism of it, you know, because he was so popular and I think Andy, in a way, was affected by. I think Andy was affected by. All of the imitators and his reputation was affected by all of the imitators, so you had all of these people painting bad barn paintings and bad landscapes with detailed grass and.

Speaker People started to think of that as what Wyeth was. And never and not actually looking at the real paintings to go back to the source. But, you know, he’s original, he was extremely original.

Speaker I created a show in Philadelphia in the 90s, I think, at the Moore Gallery, and it was a small commercial gallery, but. I asked all my favorite painters in Philadelphia to submit work, and so, you know, all of you know Nelson Shanks and Randall Jackson and Martha Urlacher and Sidney Goodman and all of the painters that were there. It was an excellent combination of people, Jamie Wyeth, Andrew White and others. And so he brought everything together. And it was amazing to me how. Andrew is painting stood out because it was so totally different, it was like every other painting in the whole show, including mine, looked like a painting is what you expected it would be. It had all the elements of a painting, a good composition, good color, well painted oil paint. But Andys was like just. The competition was a little off. The contrast was so stark, it was like just such an original thing and Jamie’s to that. When Jamie submitted to us, it was just like outside this whole world of what we think of is, you know, acceptable painting. But they both were representational, but they just had their own quality that that made them different. Highly original. It’s sort of the fact that it was sort of not self taught, because Andy knows everything about painting. I mean, he he studied all painting. He knew all painting. You know, it was rare. You could throw something out there that he didn’t know. So there were some contemporary people I talked to him about, like I’d dream he didn’t know I was interested. So I talked to him and introduced them and they became good close friends. I talked about Mark Tanzy, some of the other sort of post-modern people that did he didn’t know about at all. But that that was really interesting to be able to sort of bring some ideas to him. And they brought things to me. I mean, Betsy was always giving me books. People would give them art books. And Betsy kept nothing like if it wasn’t Andrew, why didn’t keep didn’t stay in the house. So she would give me a book that somebody had given to them. Sort of introduced me to new people, to photographers like Gertrude Cosby or. And Lucian Freud, I think she was a real big omission for you or somebody giving them some Lucian Freud books and they gave them to me and all the Ingrid Bergman films, everyone she had on video. So she gave me all of the Ingrid Bergman films, Ingmar Ingmar Bergman films, gave them all to me on VHS to get to know.

Speaker And of course, I knew about it.

Speaker That’s quite a storytelling in the.

Speaker So I’m wondering if you got to know, Andrew, through the making of the film, was that life after the pages together where you became sort of more became.

Speaker Is that a good description of what the relationship was, Denner?

Speaker Even though I had met Andy and Betsey together. It was a while before Betsy really let me spend that much time with Andy, I don’t remember how long, six months, eight months, a year maybe of me going out there and working with Betsy every day. I was sort of like her thing. It was an amazing time because it was it was 1991, it was not too many years after the Helga’s story, it broke. And so. I felt like Betsey’s sort taking me under a wing, but I was also like her, I was our project but like. Her special thing, and so I spent every day with her, and when Carolyn died, Carolyn and is what Nat died and then Carolyn died and when I think that was the order. And then when Carolyn died, his brother and sister and his brother and sister, when they died, all of a sudden the house was inside his studio was sort of then vacant and the house was was empty. So we went over and sort of cleaned up. And but before we did that, Betsy went over and went up to the studio up above and see my studio. And she saw Helga. And she can I can tell me that was the first time she’d seen how. Now, whether that’s true or not, I’m not sure, but she sure told me the story as if it were true and it was interesting how, you know, I’ll just tell you, just Mannu, it was interesting how hurt she was. Like seeing Helga.

Speaker He’ll get aged from the years when he painted her back in the 70s, but there was definitely the the the pain was still really much on the surface of the events of what had happened and.

Speaker And I think that that’s he had become more reclusive during those those years, not gone on as much, not made public appearances because it wasn’t shame, it’s just embarrassment or, you know, she just kept it more private and she’d gone inward. And so I was there to spend that time with her when during those years of part of those years of the privacy. And as I as she didn’t really want me spending too much time with Andy at first because we were working on the project together. And then once I guess I was sort of vetted and she felt like it was safe, then time had come. She told me that I could schedule an interview with Andy and he didn’t want to just sit down and talk. Never would he just sit there. That would be a waste of time. So he wanted to walk around. So you remember the circumstances around getting blankets to walk around in the snow?

Speaker And a.

Speaker Got to remember that Lynn had like tennis issues and it snowed like he was slipping and sliding, doing some extra special camera work, but it’s kind of nice.

Speaker It’s got a nice feel about it. I mean, that’s what I learned about Andrew. You know, what I know now really applies to that footage of him walking down.

Speaker That’s right. What he did. Yeah. So that’s why I’m doing this quote.

Speaker It was so great. Not so great at the time. I was like, you know, we didn’t have a steady we didn’t have a way to do it. And I thought it was going to be, you know, very tricky. But I said, yes, we have we can do it that way because that’s what Andy wanted to do and it’s the only way he wanted to do it. But it did, I mean, informed that whole film, Snow Hill, and we were lucky to to do that. But that day was one of the, you know, first days I spent that much time with it. I mean, I met him a few times, but that day, walking around Kerner’s, you know, when we shot Snow Hill, was that one of the first things I spent that much time with? And we got along really well. I mean, it was always a very natural, never forced relationship.

Speaker It was like just best friends because. He always said that he appreciated what I did, which, you know, meant a lot. It really helped cure me from the criticisms that I’ve had and the Times, but because I respected him so much. And so for him to say that really helped bolster me up. But I think that. It was a mutual respect, and I was so in all of what he had done and so that one scene, when I I ask him, I remember the question. I said, how do you stay motivated day in and day out?

Speaker And that’s when he answered, yes, I’ll be going along and see a piece of barbed wire and a piece of horse’s main stucco. You know, just give me going.

Speaker I just thought, I mean, it blew me away when he said it and it still blows me away to think about because I mean, in this fast paced world as fast, you know, to second edit world, you know, have the wherewithal to be able to.

Speaker Slow down enough. To pay attention to piece of Baqubah, a piece of horse has been stuck on it and to even care or to be inspired by that, I mean, that’s the kind of that’s where it was like a Zen master.

Speaker He would just go out every day, you know, go out and get in his jeep.

Speaker I remember one time I was out there in Chatswood working on the film. After a year or two, that film took forever for me because I was doing my first film. We were I was over in the granary that he had put me over in the granary, which was the studio that she had built for Andy, which he didn’t want on there on the property of the mill. He stayed in the schoolhouse, the other schoolhouse across Route one. I was there in the granary and it was early. You know, I’d get there early and it was snowy. And I look out the window, the granary, and I see Andy walking in the snow. He’s walking across near the mill dam because the, you know, the Brandywine River in the snow. And he walks out there and I see him stop. He’s looking down.

Speaker He looks down at this dead deer in the snow and he’s just looking at it for. Minutes.

Speaker I keep thinking maybe it’s going to get a piece of paper or something. Got to sketch it and looks at his hands behind his back the way he always walked and looked down.

Speaker And eventually after like 10 minutes of just being present with that animal, he walked back, got in his jeep, drove on to the studio, what he would do is every day he would just walk out of his house and be wide awake and he would start looking.

Speaker And he would be awake in the world and he would sometimes he wouldn’t even get down at the end of his driveway. I mean, he would drive halfway down his driveway and that you would just pull off the side of the road and he’d go and start drawing some fence posts that somebody had put up. You know, there were making a fence or something.

Speaker And then if if he still liked it, if he didn’t get to the end of it, if he if he didn’t get sated by just drawing it throughout the morning, sunlight was hitting it coming across the Brandywine Valley.

Speaker Then the next day, he would stop and do a watercolor, even that that that morning still he would do watercolor. And then if he was still interested in it, he would, you know, bring the panel and start doing a tempura until he. And he wasn’t.

Speaker He wasn’t.

Speaker You know, all the Mimecast, all the copier’s imitators, you know, they would paint something to have a rural feel, you know, like an old barn. But but he knew that tree that that fence post had come from. You know, he knew where it came from. And the guy that cut it down and cut it into a fence because he knew the guy that strung the barbed wire, he knew the horse that he got the horse on the barbed wire. You know, he knew the name of all these people. He was spending his life. He wasn’t just, you know, making. I’ve already seen, as he was saying, you know, he was actually painting his life and tapping into it, looking deeply into it, every aspect of it. He wasn’t afraid to look at every aspect of things, but he had such, you know, when he would look at you. I don’t know if other people have talked about this, but when Andy would look at you, you could not hide. His eyes were so crystal and blue clear, and they would look straight through the looks like they looked through the back of your soul. And you if you aren’t clear he was seeing it, it encouraged a kind of clarity in you by him seeing it’s like light seeing you.

Speaker I can’t think of anybody else I’ve ever experienced like that I have that sort of highly attuned people, but I’ve never met anyone else that was alive in the world the way he was.

Speaker Can I ask you to read for, like, determinism, which is a screening a little country, so they go that zone that you talked about here, in particular the squeaking zone not but sort of like.

Speaker Well, two things.

Speaker One is that it’s amazing to me that the task force was continually emotionally and creatively replenishing just as opposed to a piece of everything new.

Speaker But did he ever articulate to you like what his goal was with each day and about staying friends and that kind of clarity about what it took to be that? Was that just as natural?

Speaker They were creatures of habit, and I think that he was in the habit of working and working for him was looking. And seeing and being present, and that’s how that’s why I compare him to Zen master, because he was present in the world. And. He didn’t get distracted.

Speaker You know, he didn’t title paintings, I mean, he himself didn’t title paintings. I mean, there were rare exceptions, but I think he did. But for the most part, he looked so it was a wordless experience. He wasn’t naming things, so he wasn’t conceptualizing. And I think that’s a huge divide between what he was doing and what the rest of the art world was doing. We were trying at the Pennsylvania Academy. We were trained at the Pennsylvania Academy to come up with an idea and then to figure out how to illustrate it or to paint it or to make it a reality, how to manifest it, finding models, photographs, whatever, didn’t matter. But so it was an idea. He worked the other way.

Speaker He worked by looking and seeing and being present.

Speaker And that had led to something so what he would say is if you sit there long enough, a life will appear.

Speaker So he’d go out and sit on the riverbank, start. Just he would say.

Speaker Paint what you’re excited by, so anything that excites you is a key as a way you have to trust that. And so he would go he’d like the way the light was hitting a tree on the riverbank. So he’d go and sit and start drawing that light, hitting the tree on the riverbank. And then if he is still involved with it and engage with it and excited by it, he would start water coloring it. And then he would disappear, what he’d say is he would say, this is you may have heard this, but he would say you have to be like a pair of floating eyes. You have to be like a pair of floating eyes, which meant, I think, that you don’t exist. The ego doesn’t exist, you’re only seeing you’re seeing with clarity and with with pure vision, and so therefore you disappear. And so when you’re disappeared, the fox doesn’t mind walking right up in front of you because you’re not there. And you can paint that fox right in front of you on the riverbank and everything else, all nature starts to come back and it’s all there present for you because your present nature in a way that’s not threatening or your one with it.

Speaker That was a special gift, mainly it’s habit, because its habit was to go out every day and be in the world. As you said, you know, as he would say. He didn’t waste his time, you know. He didn’t fritter it away, he worked, but that work was. Second, nature is almost like the product that we value now and look at with such. Reverence was actually just a record of him being present.

Speaker So.

Speaker He would say be like a pair of floating eyes and he would say.

Speaker Taking a break from.

Speaker There’s a lot more, I’m sure, and not absolutely not capable of handling it, and it’s just when you think about what he was able to do there with those. Humans, you know, just like become part of their family. It is remarkable.

Speaker Yeah, good. So he’d say it it has to have an edge. And he never explained what that meant to me, but basically I think what it meant was that there has to be something about it that’s different. You can’t just keep on making things that have been made before. And so, you know, he constantly found that edge where he was.

Speaker Doing something that just turn the screw a little bit, and as you know, it’s like it had familiarity because it looked like a scene that we knew, but then it had something, you know, very different going on.

Speaker And every painting has most of great. All of his great paintings have that.

Speaker But even as NCW said, you know, even the smallest little wash of something has greatness in it, if it’s done by the hand that it’s fully engaged, so and so you see that in Andy, you know, some quick little ink wash or some quick little slap of the paint has this quality that it’s fully aware of, the whole this whole system of of being so, you know, there’s no one else that can pull off this little momentary slap dash things that that that whole the whole energy of the idea, of the feeling of the mood of the thing the way he did and could.

Speaker You like that line up, so we get interesting as well. But this line. The Hill, he says, because the person he drove and then.

Speaker What kind of time did you have together? You actually are painting together where you would be going to work and build, so.

Speaker Yeah, so. And did you like the. Yeah, we got yeah, he loved the film, he loves snow, and he thought that it was the the best thing that had been done on him, you know, and and he said it was because it was from an artist’s point of view. And it was you know, it was it was such great material, though. I mean, it’s hard to go from such great material. So I was just joking. The subject matter, subject matter, subject matter. But we got closer as the film started to wind down. I mean, I think because he was no longer like a subject for me to be working with and I no longer had to please Betsi and and deliver, which I think we did. And I think they were happy and we were happy. But after that, the summer that it started to change was 1995 when we were finished with the film. But we didn’t have distribution yet. And I was Betsi invited me up to the island in Maine because Andrew had had hip replacement surgery. So he wasn’t out on the island. He couldn’t come out whether he was in Port Clyde in Cushing, he was in Cushing. And so I had never been I’d been to Maine. I’d been to perhaps network was the home or lived. I’d spend the falls there sometimes, but I’d never been any I’ve never been farther north than that. And I’d never been out to the islands. So I’d never been farther north than that. And I’ve never been farther north in Portland and I’ve never been out to the islands, to MidCoast. And so that’s he invited me out to Allen Island last year where they had she’d built a house. And I’ve watched the process of the house. She called the house and watched the process of that house being built, because when I was working on the film, she showed me photos of it as it was being built on the island. And at the time, I didn’t realise what a feat it was to build something on a on a distant island in Maine. But it was an amazing place to visit. It was magical. You know, Chadds Ford, I only knew Andy through Chadds Ford. I only threw in Andy through the time we’d spent together in transport. And I didn’t know much about Lane at the time, even though I’d been coming since the mid 80s. But I had not been very far out. But when I when I got out to the island, I suddenly saw a completely different world transformed was this magical world, which was the magic of the Brandywine Valley and the history of Howard Pyle and NC Wyeth. And you felt it there. You felt the art history there once you get out to the islands.

Speaker And Betsy wanted me to make another film about Andy and me and the islands, but I was just like so wiped out. I was at that point, too. I mean, I’d want to puke. So I was just ready to paint. I was like I had a little window of time.

Speaker And I just want to be a painter at that point because I’ve been so inspired by Andrew from the years of working on the film. So I was I was painting away. And so she has me out to the island and it’s just me and her. And every night, you know, she brings me to the house for lobster dinner and then sends me back out to my little cottage where I am. And and she gives me a barn on that on Biner Island, a brand new barn that she had just she was always building these different buildings, you know, as Wyeth world that she was creating, always being built. So Andy could be surprised and be inspired by them. So she she said, you can have the barn as your studio. So I spent the summer in that barn making paintings. And I was terrified because every day I would I would bring Aquash back or something back painting a small painting and show it to her. But I knew that it had to be really good or she would tear into it. She had to rip it apart and she’d make you want to kill yourself. There were some close moments on the island. No, she really would. She was just so demanding about quality. That idea of, you know, working into it couldn’t be better. You didn’t show it to her until you got it. As good as it could be.

Speaker Yeah.

Speaker So Andy had suggested to her they had been talking, he was unsure. He has suggested to her that I use some of his watercolors because she was saying I was just doing these small galoshes, so. She gave me his watercolors and gave me his brushes and said, now you go off and do a full sheet of watercolor, you know, you slap it around so. I took the watercolours over to the studio and I was looking around, I couldn’t decide what to paint, so I looked down and the sheep right outside the door, I was going to do some painting of some sheep. I was going to some oil paintings of the sheep. But I looked down and one and just relieved itself right outside the door. And there was a sheep turd sitting there.

Speaker So now, Sean, I do this watercolor, my first watercolor ever of. A beautiful sheep turn in the sunlight, I take it back and I hand the watercolours back and that after that night I handed back and handed the brushes, I say, you tell Andrew Wyatt, this is what I think of his watercolors. Oh, they loved it. They just thought it was a hoot. So I gave her the sheep dirt. That’s my one endeavor and watercolor.

Speaker It’s a difficult medium, very difficult.

Speaker I did want to ask you what is right and why do you think it was such a good year? And before we get to of heart, you were invented by a man. We your battery and card, please. Good time. How are you feeling? I feel fine.

Speaker Need to hydrate first anyway. What was I idea.

Speaker So do not regret ever. Did you ever know regret or do you know of regret ever. He was a chance for an artist and filmmaker. That’s he suggested that I speak with him when we were making Snow Hill, so he has a credit in Snellville.

Speaker I asked him about time he spent with Andy, and he said that he used to paint with Andy all the time and that what an event happened one day that changed his life. And he was painting with Andy along the Brandywine River on the riverbank. And he was over there trying to paint the way Andy painted, you know, with a single hairbrush, like painting every little piece of grass.

Speaker And Andy sitting beside him to his left and Andy sort of making some noises like he’s not exactly happy with the way it’s going. He’s not painting and of starting to make some noises and all of a sudden he looks over and he grabs mud from the riverbank and scrubs it across the bottom and is painting this piece of paper.

Speaker Just they kept on going.

Speaker It kept on working. And in that moment, we realized what Andy was doing that he did. He wasn’t mimicking nature, that he wasn’t copying nature. What he was doing was creating nature. And he was the thing he was working on was the thing. He wasn’t trying to render the mud on the river bank. He just made the river did in two seconds and got it. And from you know, I think he suggested to me that that was it for him. It was a turning point. And he, like, never went back to trying to paint that way again, like he understood something bigger about what art is and what art can be because and he just wasn’t afraid. And you can’t be afraid.

Speaker And the thing that amazed me was how long Andy would work, so I one day when I was out in Maine and I was going out to the island, I’d come early that morning from Rockland. I think I’d come early and I was coming down to their house and cooking and I was going to take the boat out to Betsey’s island. They’d come on shore for some reason. And I was just going to be out there for the day. So I come in in the morning. It’s like 8:00 in the morning. And Andy’s sitting over there with hip replacement, sitting on a chair and he’s drawing the back of their house in Cushing. And he’s working on this drawing. And it’s, you know, it’s this big and he’s working on the lines of the angle of the roof as it comes down and the banister as as it goes and perspective down the back porch.

Speaker And I got to the island, do some things. You know, I talked to Betsy about the film or something and a little bit of business we had to take care of. And then late that day, the latest boat, I get back before it gets dark, I come back. It’s a long day in the summer. And then I come back. And when I get to the dock and I start walking up the yard, I come around the house, you know, not expecting to see Andy.

Speaker He’s still sitting in the same spot. I mean, it’s been 12, 14 hours. He still sat in the same spot, working on the same drawing. I just I couldn’t believe it.

Speaker It was like you didn’t worry about the light changing, you know, the conditions changing. You know, nothing like I mean, had to been a completely different side of the house, but he just, like, kept walking straight through it because he was getting the essence of the thing.

Speaker And when I talked about how exhausting, especially the tempers they would be. So I guess that dedication and concentration that.

Speaker Time’s passing.

Speaker Yeah, and later, I think later it did fewer and fewer tempers, he I was amazed that one of the things that amazed me was how inspired he could be so fast by something. So he always influenced me and always inspired me. I mean, everything he did inspired me. And I see it in my paintings.

Speaker But and I readily acknowledge that and honor that. And hopefully things are damaged and not something else, but. A few times, I know, because I was there, I had some influence on him and it was really humbling, but I remember one time I had done a portrait of my ex-wife in a black fur cap. She bought this porcupine kind of hat and I did a painting of her out in the snow. And it and and he really liked it. I showed it to them and Andy really liked it and and he bought it. He bought it as a gift for Betsi.

Speaker That was on a Saturday, I think.

Speaker And so I was, you know, still going out there and sort of working on on the film, not as a full time, but part time. So I think it was a Thursday that I was out there and I went back to into the schoolhouse and I went around the corner of the kitchen. I peeked into the little bedroom where sometimes Andy would store drawings or paintings that I was working on if he was working near Betsy or near the schoolhouse. And I looked in there and there was a portrait of Betsy wearing a black hat with with black fur sticking out from her head.