The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles

An ekphrastic experiment in imaginative biography and personal detachment.

The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles presents an imaginative narrative of the painter’s creative life, rife with both losses and pleasures. Janée J. Baugher employs the footnote form to write a book-length narrative of ekphrastic poetry in which the character of Andrew Wyeth chronicles his internal musings. The sixty-three Wyeth paintings that influenced these poems (dated 1938 through 2008) are the ones in which Baugher delighted in how the quotidian is made tender, like a white sheet drying outside on the line or sunflowers’ shadows against a house.

Studying the work of this particular artist was a decades-long meditative practice of deep looking, a method by which the author detaches from her ego. Wyeth’s paintings, drawings, and watercolors became portals through which she could imagine worlds beyond her immediate awareness and in which she could explore linguistic possibilities.