Copyrighted 2003. Not to be copied, borrowed, or published without written permission.
This article is available for reprint. Contact Sheri by e-mail: Sheri@Bell-Rehwoldt.com, or via phone: 716/946-7308.

SAMPLE ARTIST PROFILE

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@Bell-Rehwoldt.com, or via phone: 716/946-7308.