Wyeth is also drawn to people who have roots sunk deep into the American experience, people who become for the artist living embodiments of this country’s past. The Finn, a portrait of George Erickson, a Maine neighbour, is reflective of the determination and toughness of those Finnish immigrants who came here at the turn of the century to form their own soiid farming community in Maine. The compellingly handsome face of Nogeeshik, an American Indian, becomes a vehicle for exploring the manly pride and stoicism tied to the verj antiquity of this land. Often those whom Wyeth paints are loners, outsiders without roots or an established place within a larger society: Willard Snowden, for instance, who appeared unannounced looking for work, and who lived in Wyeth’s studio a few years before disappearing again. Or the Lynch boys (…) And then there are those like Karl Kuerner, whose ordered life, tidy farm, scrubbed walls, frothy apple cider, hanging dead deer, slaughtered pigs, and disturbed wife have become for Wyeth a microcosm of man’s contradictions. Here he finds reason and its absence, purity and its antithesis, the enjoyment of life and its brutal extinction.
(Wanda M. Corn. The Art of Andrew Wyeth)

Olson, one painted in 1947 and the other in 1952. In the] earlier picture, Christina Olson, a bony, angular figure is but one of the elements contributing to the overall mood. {..,) Five years later, in Miss Olson, the figure has become soft in her volumes and natural i in her setting, her humanness now dominating the composition and establishing the tone of the entire work. Lost in herself and her tender affection for the kitten, she radiates warmth and dignity. We share the artist’s devotion to her, and in her anonymity and self-reflection we sense our common humanity. (…)
This new naturalness of pose and proportion does not mean that Wyeth was becoming a portraitist. On the contrary, he has never considered himself a reporter of likenesses, and for this reason rarely accepts a portrait commission. (.’..) Those he paints sit by invitation, and with the possible exception of his family, represent Wyeth’s profound and many-layered fascination with very particular kinds of people, faces, and situations. {…)
Many of his models, like himself, do not travel far in their life-times: the hardy New Englanders of Maine, for instance, or the Negro families who have lived for generations around Chadds Ford. On one level he likes the country humour and manners of these people and is challenged by their hard core of reticence. On a more meaningful level, Wyeth admires their regional uniqueness in today’s increasingly homogenized world. He is attracted to men and women who are still stalwartly independent and self-sufficient, and who need to rely little on the outside world for anything beyond the common amenities. Untravelled and without the knowledge that comes from books or wider acquaintances, they continually impress Wyeth with their innocence, their individuality, and their pragmatic wisdom. (…)

Andrew Wyeth’s most memorable paintings of the 1940s came in 1947—1948, just as he rounded the corner of his thirtieth year. A trio of paintings done in those years represents the high point of his early work: Wind from the Sea, ‘Karl, and Christina’s World. Still exhibiting the tense anxiousness and air of expectancy characteristic of earlier work, the pictures offer in addition the kind of simplification and resolution that conies when an artist hits upon both a subject matter and a style commensurate with his expressive ideals. These works ‘introduce two of the families that were to become Wyeth’s greatest fascinations, the Olsons and the Kuerners; and they further refine those elements of style that are his hallmark: the use of a dry and. detailed realism, an economy of compositional elements, and the painting of scenes from unusual or unexpected vatage points. Moreover, in Karl and Wind from the Sea, ‘ Wyeth avoids the kind of obvious drama or symbolism that still lingers in Christina’s World, where the woman seemingly strains or yearns for the mystery-shrouded house on the horizon. Now the artist transcends such literalism and discovers instead a pregnant moment or gesture for his sitters or landscapes — a gust of wind giving sudden life to the tattered curtains of an old window, or the cocking of Karl’s head as he suddenly hears the movements of his mentally ill * wife downstairs. It may be unnecessary and even distracting for us to know the reason for Karl’s slightly turned head. Yet it was extremely important for the artist to find a revealing pose for the solid, ruddy-faced German farmer which could be counterpoised against the thrust of the menacing meat hooks and the cracked attic ceiling. For Wyeth, much of the picture’s meaning conies through such a juxtaposition. The discovery of a meaningful “moment” for a. major picture becomes perhaps the most significant part of picture-making in Wyeth’s mature style. It may be stimulated by the simplest experiences: seeing the light strike the side of a building or a person’s face, inadvertently coming upon a child lost in his own thoughts, or meeting a face coming out of the darkness. (…) The genesis and happenstance of such moments are one of the few things the artist enjoys talking about in relationship to his work, suggesting the compelling importance they have in his own understanding of the artistic process.
The charged and ominous atmosphere that characterizes Wyeth’s early work begins to subside in the early 1950s. Landscapes such as the magnificent Snow Flurries take on a new breadth and abstract simplicity. Human figures soften and draw into themselves, and the overt anxiousness seen in his self-portrait (The Reuenant, 1949) gives way to a different kind of compassionate and emphatic drama, one best understood by contrasting two of the temperas of Christina

The Virgin started off as a much bigger panel. For a while there were baskets of corn hanging above which you use for seed corn in the spring and some stalls with hay. All that was in it for a time, but in the end I cut the panel way down to make it a much better composition. I realized that the emphasis was just right at that cut-down size. I had to go through the other things that were familiar to me before finally I had the guts to put down something fresh. I was relying on the strict disciplinarian side of my nature and then I broke out of that into the freer side by focusing in. Artistically, I went from complexity to simplicity. Within myself I went from the disciplinarian side to the free side.
Somehow I can’t imagine that picture being dated. Maybe the slight mark of the bikini might, but I doubt it, it’s so subtle. You wouldn’t notice it unless you looked close. And I love that strange line around her that outlines the body. I think it’s some of the purest tempera painting I ever did in that torso, because it almost becomes an abstraction of the truth. There are parts of the picture that are almost water-colour. But I thought this is the flash in the picture. This is the sparkle. I think you run from that waxen quality of the lower part of the figure going up all of a sudden to the sunlight on the upper body. I had to paint like mad to get it. But, fortunately, I had the whole figure painted in and could work quite directly on the head and hair. I refined it, of course, later on, but to get it there had to be some pretty excited strokes when that sun came out. The line, for instance, coming down across her chest out over the breast, was a very definite shadow under the corded part of her neck and up to her ear. It was very definite and contrasted with the luminosity of the part where the curls break slightly.
To me, these pictures of the young Sin” are continuations of Olsons, and at the same time they are sharp counteractions to the portraits of Christina, which symbolize the deterioration and the dwindling of something. Then you get suddenly this change of such an invigorating, zestful, powerful phenomenon. Here was something bursting forth, like spring coming through the ground. In a way this was not a figure, but more a burst of life. I don’t think it lives just because it’s a nude girl. That wasn’t the reason at all for painting it. There are a lot of farms more effective than the Kuerners1 but that isn’t the point at all. Here, as always, I try to go beyond the subject. That’s the summation of my art. Emotion is my bulwark. 1 think that’s the only thing that endures, finally. If you are emotionally involved, you’re not going to be easily changed. But if it’s purely a technical experience that’s going to be very shortlived. Both technical and emotional have got to be on even terms to be good.
(…) People often have said to me, “What’s made you keep on against the tide? Supposedly, you’re so way behind that you’re ahead!” Not really. The answer is pure emotion, I was interested in Christina, I was interested it that house. I was fascinated by the Kuerners and the farm. I wasn’t at either place to paint a nice group of pictures of bucolic memories or Maine images. I was emotionally involved in the thing and I just had to get it out of my system. That’s all.
Art, to me, is seeing. I think you have got to use your eyes as well as your emotion, and one without the other doesn’t work. That’s my art.
(Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: Kuerners and Olsons. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, volume XXXIV, No. 2)

She was fifteen. That was a remarkable experience because by that time she’d really become a young woman. I did the painting in the Erickson barn and started it on a foggy day. I said to her, ‘Come on, Siri, we are going to do this.’ She said, ‘Well, you stay downstairs.’ And she went upstairs in the barn and then -came down those steps — a remarkable girl. It was an amazing experience with the quality and the smells of the barn, and this healthy Finnish girl, no affectation, no lipstick, never had had any dates, absolute virgin. It was remarkable, like finding a young doe in the woods. I consider that picture a very precious picture to me because I knew I was looking at something that was untouched, unaffected. (…)
I worked for about four weeks just on the proportions of her standing figure. You will notice there’s no real location again. You are looking down at the feet and up to the head at the same time. You couldn’t get that angle with a photograph. She moved in different positions to get the right pose. 1 wasn’t particularly located in any spot. There is a floor there in the painting, but it isn’t there, in a sense. 1 started working on the body and began to paint it in. The sun came out one day, in the morning, and she stepped back, you notice the windows across a barn door. The sun came through them, and her head just hit the sun, which fell against her face and upper body for a short time. I painted like mad. She stepped up the steps a little just to catch that, and it made the picture. It has a marvelous bit of gold with the rest of the room in the shadow. That’s what happened, simple as that.
1 really like the painting because it has a kind of mythical quality. Do you know Pohjola’s Daughter dy Sibelius, which is to me an amazing composition? It all goes with that. She once told me she liked to ride bareback in the summer at nighttime completely nude with her blond hair streaming behind her. It’s wild country back there, I used to think about that story and about that amazing figure. This healthy, young Finnish girl on the horse. I even thought of her connection with moose, in terms of the early Finnish legend about an elk and a beautiful girl and the combination of the two. You see all of this came into it. It’s a world all of its own. I never consider it a nude painting. I consider it more than that. But The Virgin was good, because that is absolutely what it was, it was a virginal idea for me, fresh, untouched, with this golden glow
about it. (…)

In my portraits of Christina, I go from Christina Olson, vhich is a formal one, a classic pose in the doorway, all the way through Christina’s World, which is a magical environment, that is, it’s a portrait but with a much broader symbolism, to the complete closeness of focusing in Miss Olson. Miss Olson was a shock to some people who had- the illusion that the person in Christina’s World was a young, beautiful
girl. <,..)
It is very interesting that Christina’s World has such a wide appeal. People seem to put themselves into it. I got literally hundreds of letters a year from people saying that it’s a portrait of themselves. And then they describe their own life. And (hey rarely mention the crippled quality. They don’t see that. It doesn’t seem to enter into it. (…)
When I was working on-a close study called The Apron, I realized, I sensed, 1 don’t know, I had a premonition that things were coming to an end, and I thought, I’d better zoom right in on her and do just her remarkable head. And so I started this tempera of her sitting there. It’s called Anna Christina. I started it at a time when we had dense fog for about a month and a half in July to August. I painted her in the kitchen-but with the door open so that her head was really against the white fog. In the painting you will notice that the fog creeps into all the tonalities of her skin. That was fascinating to me, because it brought out the intensity of her eyes, the slight pinks around the eyelids, her mouth. The whole thing is really a portrait of the weather at that time. (…) If you look at the picture closely, you will notice that it is built up very carefully. There’s a slight transition of tones, it’s white but it’s got a subdued, warm cast by which I wanted to make you feel the fog. (…)
(…) in this painting, Anna Christina, you notice there’s no definite light or atmospheric emphasis at all. There’s a transparency about her skin that is the real reason for this picture. And I was intrigued as far as colour is concerned with the flour and the green sour apples that she made her pies out of. That’s an interesting green in contrast with the tone of her skin. There’s a tonality in this that brings out the quality of her eyeball and the way she would look around at me. She had the quality of a Medici head, you know. There was a terrific power in her strong neck, interesting thing. (…)
(…) Christina’s was a powerful face with a great deal of fortitude. It’s not a glowering or dour face. There she was, without any affectation. (…)
But in a strange sense there is a continuation of Olsons and Christina, in some of my recent work. This appears in the paintings 1 have done of the young girl Siri, when she was fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. (…) The first was the Sauna and The Virgin was painted a year after. (…)