Evening at Kuerners

In 2010, Los Angeles-based artist James Welling began taking a series of color photographs inspired by the painter Andrew Wyeth. Welling started the Wyeth series as an examination of the artist’s influence on his own career. This project represents one artist entering into the creative mind of another artist. Welling was fascinated and challenged by what he saw in Wyeth’s work.

In order to experience the physicality of Wyeth’s world, Welling went on location in Pennsylvania and Maine and photographed in the same areas where Wyeth painted throughout his life. His goal was not to make a literal record of these subjects, but rather to reference aspects of Wyeth’s style, technique and palette. Welling’s investigations led him to a greater understanding of the degree of painterly license found in many of Andrew Wyeth’s works. In response, Welling digitally manipulated elements of many of his photographs in the studio in order to capture the moods and atmosphere of Wyeth’s paintings.

"Evening at Kuerner’s" shares a title and composition with a painting by Andrew Wyeth (1970, private collection). In both the photograph by Welling and the painting by Wyeth, a Pennsylvania farmhouse is depicted in the twilight hours, and in each, a single window is illuminated. The artist in each case chooses to view the home from a distance, but he still manages to make the viewer acknowledge the house’s inhabitants through the glow of the interior light.