Distant thunder
A painting by Andrew Wyeth has a young woman fallen asleep on a grassy field. A straw hat covers her face from the sun. Before her, an empty cup, a little box, perhaps of chocolate, cues of a half finished picnic inside the peace of a slow afternoon. There is nothing that would seem to be disturbing in this pastoral scene except for a dog in the background. It has roused itself from sleep and now seems to be listening intently.
You would have to know a bit of America or read the literature on Wyeth to understand this painting completely. Wyeth is famous for realistic paintings of the American midwest. This includes a swathe of grasslands they still call “Tornado Alley.” One might therefore interpret this painting to be one that speaks of a coming storm. And so the title, “Distant Thunder.”
Wyeth was once famous among local artists coming within the generation of Fred Galan, Kimsoy Yap, Boy Kiamko, Gig de Pio, Romulo Galicano and others. Wyeth might have represented for them a preferred manner of modernism which did not remove itself from the realm of realism. Wyeth’s paintings are almost photographic in their final appeal. But a close inspection of the canvas reveals he borrowed his style mostly from the Pointillists, except for the fact that his little dabs of paint was even “littler” than post-impressionists like Georges Seurat.
But Wyeth’s strength was not his obvious technical skill. That strength comes to be expected of all realists. After awhile of contemplating such a manner of strength, one cannot help becoming bored and searching for other things which might be found inside a painting. In the case of Wyeth one finds this in his subtle love and sensitivity for his subject matter. His paintings are Americana. And this might be why he is often cited together with painters like Norman Rockwell who became famous for his cover illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post. Besides Rockwell, the other artists of Americana are Edward Hopper, Georgia Okeefe and Andy Warhol, among others. They exemplify the artist’s rootedness to the land and its peculiarities of culture. In the end their art always capture the passing of time and its consequence, the shifting lay of the land, albeit un-selfconsciously.
They are after all just expressing in painting the beauty that was all about them. But it is a beauty that always transcends the simple landscape. They are worlds loaded with a richness of meanings. Thus, when Hopper paints what would seem to be a simple night-scene of a man drinking coffee alone inside a diner, a couple sitting across him from the bar, he is not just capturing what the scene looks like. He is capturing time and space and loading it with meanings that derive from his own experiences. And the sum of everything is his love for the world, or more exactly, his own particular world.
In a land regularly visited by typhoons, one must wonder why there are hardly any paintings here about typhoons. Typhoons do not come to Cebu as much as to other places of the country. But even so, typhoons are markers of local history. We remember Ruping, Nitang, etc. They have almost always been disastrous when they came. One can only wonder if the next one will be as bad. But perhaps not. How can anyone exactly predict these things anymore?
But there is always something about typhoons before they actually come. There is a mellow calm in the air. Is there a foreboding? People do not think of it. Always, people go about their lives as if it is not coming at all. We are like the young girl sleeping in the field midway through a lonely picnic in Wyeth’s painting. Inside the next few moments the dog might bark. The young girl might wake up, search the skies for further signs and then walk calmly home. What else after all can be done?
We will most likely greet the apocalypse the same way. Not with a sense of defeat, nor an excess of fear, instead; we will all of us most likely find our way back home with that sense of mellow expectancy we reserve for those things which are and have always been beyond our control. The world has always been that way for us. The thunder has never ever been far away.
