Torn Spruce 1975

Jamie Wyeth made this painting, Torn Spruce, with visible brushstrokes, like he’s really thinking about the light and the texture of the tree. I can just imagine him, staring intently, maybe for hours, at this one broken tree in the middle of the woods. The way he's captured the splintered wood – that jagged edge against the softer needles – you can almost feel the violence of the break, the raw vulnerability of the tree. And he's really getting at something about resilience, about how nature persists even when it’s been torn apart. The way the branches twist and reach—it’s like a gesture, a painterly shrug, as if to say, “Well, what can you do?” I like to think Wyeth, who comes from a family of painters, was in dialogue with his father and grandfather, each of them looking at nature, trying to capture something essential about the world around them. Like they were all thinking about mortality and persistence, in their own way.