Out
& About Magazine
Award Winner, National Federation of Press Women––First
Place
"A. B. McCoy––The Other
Wyeth"
Artist Anna Brelsford McCoy is a woman of contradictions.
She feels the need to stay close to her Chadds Ford, Pa., roots, but
retreats each summer to Maine when the sizzle and lush foliage make
her claustrophobic. She built a new house, but gave it the patina
of age. And she early recognized her need to be an artist, but made
choices that sidelined her passion until she was nearly 40. She wants
her work to stand without comparison to her famous family, yet her
very being is intertwined with the Wyeth legacy.
Anna B., as she prefers to be called, entered the world in 1940, born
to Ann Wyeth, the youngest daughter of illustrator N.C. Wyeth. She
was only four years old when her grandfather died, but she has long
felt his looming presence––a lingering memory of tobacco
smoke, a tickle under the chin, an exciting, bumpy ride in his old
station wagon up to his studio. "Other memories, I think, are
from my mother," she says. "People say, 'Oh, Pa would have
liked that.' To this day he's very much a part of our lives."
Her blood also carries the pragmatic genes of the McCoys. Her father's
escape to the art world branded him the black sheep of the family.
"The McCoys are businessmen. My uncle was president of the DuPont
Company, and my grandfather was a vice president," says Anna
B. "My grandfather wanted my father to go to Cornell and learn
a trade, but he went abroad and became a set designer."
John W. McCoy eventually became a student of N.C. Wyeth, which continued
his involvement with Ann Wyeth, an accomplished composer and watercolorist
still living in their Chadds Ford home. While McCoy is recognized
in art circles as one of America's best watercolorists, Anna B. remembers
her father as a "tall, skinny man with enormous hands" who
was able to capture in a painting what all of his senses recorded.
Among the "thousands of memories" she has of her father
teaching her to paint as a child, one is analogous to her presentation
of him in her recent book, John W. McCoy, American Painter.
"I'd done a watercolor of a tree. My father critiqued it. He
said, 'You have to remember that a tree forms because it's reaching
for the light.'
"He was not at home in his body," she continues. "He
was awkward––it was as if he didn't quite know what was
at the ends of his wrists––but he imitated a tree, his
hands crooked. I've never forgotten it and I never look at a tree
without thinking of him. In the book I tried to have you feel as if
he had reached out with one of his large hands and touched you."
Her father's ability to communicate through his art––"the
loneliness of a bell buoy or the crashing of waves"––is
perhaps one reason Anna B. dislikes the "flatness" of fine
art reproductions, a commercial path her uncle, Andrew Wyeth, and
cousin, Jamie Wyeth, have taken.
"I had a great discussion with my uncle about this," she
explains. "I said, I realize that the critics are pretty down
on Wyeth painters, and that I think it's because there are so many
reproductions. It's become a business. Andy said, 'That isn't why
I paint. I'm not commercial.' But who can buy an original Wyeth painting
now?"
Sadness, perhaps, more aptly describes her feeling about investment
in reproductions. "I think it trivializes the painting. I'm looking
over at two Winslow Homer post cards on my fridge right now. They
were sent to me, and I keep them because I can see the originals in
my mind. But I would never enlarge the postcards," she says.
"I want people to be sucked into seeing the real thing."
Strong Beginnings
Anna B.'s formal art instruction began when she was 14. Her instructor
was her aunt, Carolyn Wyeth. Her cousin Jamie also studied with Carolyn,
an option available to any of the Wyeth offspring seriously interested
in art. "She parroted my grandfather and taught what he taught,"
says Anna B. "Her main thing was to feel it, touch it, become
a part of what you do. If it was a gun, to pick it up and feel the
weight of it."
Although John McCoy had to fight his father for the freedom to paint,
he decided his daughter's art lessons were secondary to a liberal
arts education. "My father made most of the rules. When my grandfather
McCoy offered to send me to Tower Hill School [in Wilmington, Del.]
when I was 12, my father went along with it," says Anna B. "My
family concentrated on a more rounded education, while Jamie was tutored
and got to paint. I don't think the females were encouraged in the
same way. I was very protected. Perhaps it was chauvinistic. A nicer
word is patriarchal."
A bit braver at 17, Anna B. announced her intention to attend the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Again, her
father intervened. "He taught there and thought I would become
a bohemian. I ended up attending Bennett College [in New York] for
two years," she says. "If I had been more sure of myself
I would have gone to the Academy."
Ultimately she did apply and was accepted to the Academy. But it was
also during this same period of time that she met Chadds Ford artist
George "Frolic" Weymouth. When she married him in 1961,
her growth as an artist completely stalled.
"Marriage was what you did then, but I don't know what I was
thinking," she says. "I was 20, but really I was 12––still
mentally and physically a child. I was in braids on our honeymoon.
I remember people asking if Frolic (though only five years older,
but balding) was my father. I went from one father to another."
Having traded acceptance to the Academy for a frenetic lifestyle of
polo, non-stop entertaining and eventual partnership in an antiques
business, she had no time to paint. Seven years into the marriage,
McCoy realized she needed out. "Frolic was kind, and I learned
a lot from him, but I was unfulfilled. I was never taken seriously
as a painter–– by him or anyone else––but
I wasn't doing anything serious about it, so it's nobody's fault but
my own," she says. "There was no continuity to our life.
I couldn't paint like that."
A New Path
When her marriage to Weymouth ended in divorce in 1979, she never
considered abandoning her roots for a new beginning. Chadds Ford is
a magnet Anna B. can't shake, as is her summer home in Maine. Since
childhood, she has traveled between the two homesteads, needing both
to keep her sanity. "I love Chadds Ford in the winter,"
says Anna B. "But I can't bear this jungle look. The foliage
gets to me, even though I'm trying to grow more of it on my property."
Patrick Mundy, Anna B.'s husband of seven years, supports his wife's
need to rejuvenate in Maine. "He's incredible about my painting,"
says Anna B. "He knows that I have to go, and he allows me to
do so. He's my life, I want to be with him, but I need to go."
Still, her return to Chadds Ford is pleasurably anticipated. Sated
with lobster, rocky beaches and painting the local landscape, she
returns home to some special project she set aside before leaving.
Home is just off the bustle of Route 1, secluded on a narrow winding
back road, deep into Wyeth country. The five-acre property acts as
an oasis, a barrier to encroaching development. "I feel rich
because I'm looking at some of the most beautiful land," says
Anna B. "My father gave me the property after my divorce."
The artist designed and built her home in the early '80s when she
could afford neither architect nor builder. But she struck a bargain
with a contractor friend, bartering construction time for art––she
did portraits of his children.
The exterior of her house is deceiving; structural elements persuade
you they have been in place for ages. Well-used antiques fill the
home; paintings by the famous men––and women––in
her family hang next to her own. "I didn't want to put a modern
house next to my parents house," she says, explaining her decision
to reproduce historic elements. "I'm more comfortable with imperfections;
old is warmth to me."
And painting is passion, which is why Anna B. is most often found
in the separate studio later added to the property. Several of her
paintings brighten the white walls of the single room. An old iron
stove sits in one corner; a blue-and-white plaid wing chair rests
on a wheeled platform, awaiting the next portrait subject. Double
doors face the expansive lushness of her backyard and the woods beyond.
Accompanied by "Poodle," her 10-year old black standard
poodle and "Katie," her 6-year-old Bouvier, Anna B. is content
in the peaceful environment.
Here she reflects on her art. "When I went back to painting I
didn't call myself an artist for many years," she says. "You
think, Am I good enough? I'm constantly compared to my uncle, my father,
my aunt. People think, If she's a Wyeth, she must be good. I don't
mind being considered an investment, but I want people to like what
I do. I want them to be disturbed––to feel joy, nostalgia,
whatever. I want them to say, 'Oh my god, look!'"
"[Anna B.'s] paintings are personal portraits of the environment
that surrounds her," says Sadie Somerville, co-owner of the Somerville
Manning Gallery in Greenville. "They can be playful like the
portrait of her dog after a toy, or sensual like the view down a garden
path at her place in Maine. Her excellent use of light and shadow
further enhances the inviting warmth that is present in her work."
"I don't think about my paintings that way," the artist
counters. "The best work I ever do is work that I don't know
how I did it. Some painters always use the same tricks, the same formula.
But for me it always has to be spontaneous; I never start with intentions."
She must be doing something right, because her appreciative audience
keeps growing. Over the last 20 years, Anna B. has seen the prices
for her work rise ten-fold. "I'm thrilled when my paintings sell,
but that's not why I paint," she says. "It's a way to make
money, but for some of us there's no other choice. It's an addiction,
and it's very depressing when you're away from it. My uncle says,
'My God. My life is painting.' Andy really has a one-track mind."
A warm relationship with her uncle allows for companionable critiques.
Anna B. finds it reassuring that even the illustrious Wyeths are anxious
for validation of their work. "Every time Jamie or Andy finishes
a painting and they ask us to come see it, they are so nervous. And
they're so excited when you like it," she says. "They're
the same as everyone else in their work. I think they are totally,
utterly human and utterly insecure. Any painter worth his salt is."
Realizing the gender usage in her use of the word "his,"
Anna B. sighs.
"It's a chauvinist world out there––still. It's interesting
how we peg people. I'll see a painting I love, and ask the painter's
name. I have caught myself thinking, Oh, it's by a woman," she
says. "It's glued into our genes, I guess, but we're slowly breaking
those patterns. That's why I sign my paintings A. B. McCoy––so
no one is swayed by the fact that I'm a woman."
Copyrighted 2003. Not to be copied,
borrowed, or published without written permission.
This article is available for reprint. Contact Sheri by e-mail: Sheri@Rehwoldt.com,
or via phone: 716/946-7308.
