Wyeth's gulls, strutting head back, beak open, venting in loud, open-throated screams, or tearing to pieces some flesh naked or shelled, or bullying one another with arrogant caws and vicious stabs, or else preening and cooing prior to mating, or sated and resting, yellow eyes ringed with red: other.
In any extensive show of one artist, such as Jamie Wyeth's at the Museum of Fine Arts, themes emerge from seeing the same images appear in picture after picture, and Wyeth confronts the demonic in his studies of gulls. In fact, a sequence of paintings is devoted to the seven deadly sins illustrated by gull behavior. Another, titled 'Inferno' is of a boy stoking a metal fire box with gulls making flying and crying all around. Wyeth says the eye of a gull suggests more remoteness than the broadest expanse of ocean.
I remember in Sierra Leone visiting a village for an extended time, and taking with me a bag of rice for myself. My room opened off the central room of the house where I was staying, but it also opened directly outside. The chickens roaming the village soon discovered my sack, so when, for any reason, the outside door was open, there was soon a busy group of birds pecking at the sacking to get at my, my, rice.
To shoo them out of the room was a task because they wouldn't be herded; rather they scattered around the room and reassembled on the bag. As time passed, the hens got savvier and more persistent. The least inattention and I was having to confront a a flock of feathered fowl for whom I was a minor distraction.
Still, the bargain holds: our grain for the food they provide, their eggs or they themselves cooked. We perhaps get the best of the bargain; I know I ate some of my 'persecutors' in cassava leaf sauce. Who has eaten gull, however? Once their eggs were intensively hunted and the numbers of birds plunged. They're back though, brawling over our beaches, as much as sign of ocean as salt air.
Wyeth's gulls have the cast of the infernal about them, representing all aggressive scavengers of discarded or dead things, fully self-absorbed and remorseless, ever alert to chances to thrust their scimitar beaks into something wet and quivery. It's their cold eyes, their open throats, their shouldering, their ever-circling back that makes them seem alien.
It's this in people that terrifies us. The seven cardinal vices--arrogance, greed, gluttony, rage, lust, laziness, envy--are alien to none of us. Wyeth's gulls are us with wings. It's not pretty.
I don't want to be gulled by appearances, though. The blandest human expression can hide any of these, and equipped as well, as gulls are not, with ideology, strategy, and institutional reinforcement; witness the Goya etchings elsewhere in the museum.
Your choice of that ubiquitous shore bird to show us to ourselves was brilliant; the images pierced my complacency. I have to own my inner gull.
In any extensive show of one artist, such as Jamie Wyeth's at the Museum of Fine Arts, themes emerge from seeing the same images appear in picture after picture, and Wyeth confronts the demonic in his studies of gulls. In fact, a sequence of paintings is devoted to the seven deadly sins illustrated by gull behavior. Another, titled 'Inferno' is of a boy stoking a metal fire box with gulls making flying and crying all around. Wyeth says the eye of a gull suggests more remoteness than the broadest expanse of ocean.
I remember in Sierra Leone visiting a village for an extended time, and taking with me a bag of rice for myself. My room opened off the central room of the house where I was staying, but it also opened directly outside. The chickens roaming the village soon discovered my sack, so when, for any reason, the outside door was open, there was soon a busy group of birds pecking at the sacking to get at my, my, rice.
To shoo them out of the room was a task because they wouldn't be herded; rather they scattered around the room and reassembled on the bag. As time passed, the hens got savvier and more persistent. The least inattention and I was having to confront a a flock of feathered fowl for whom I was a minor distraction.
Still, the bargain holds: our grain for the food they provide, their eggs or they themselves cooked. We perhaps get the best of the bargain; I know I ate some of my 'persecutors' in cassava leaf sauce. Who has eaten gull, however? Once their eggs were intensively hunted and the numbers of birds plunged. They're back though, brawling over our beaches, as much as sign of ocean as salt air.
Wyeth's gulls have the cast of the infernal about them, representing all aggressive scavengers of discarded or dead things, fully self-absorbed and remorseless, ever alert to chances to thrust their scimitar beaks into something wet and quivery. It's their cold eyes, their open throats, their shouldering, their ever-circling back that makes them seem alien.
It's this in people that terrifies us. The seven cardinal vices--arrogance, greed, gluttony, rage, lust, laziness, envy--are alien to none of us. Wyeth's gulls are us with wings. It's not pretty.
I don't want to be gulled by appearances, though. The blandest human expression can hide any of these, and equipped as well, as gulls are not, with ideology, strategy, and institutional reinforcement; witness the Goya etchings elsewhere in the museum.
Your choice of that ubiquitous shore bird to show us to ourselves was brilliant; the images pierced my complacency. I have to own my inner gull.
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