Renfield

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 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.

The title and setting of this photograph recall one by Wyeth ("Renfield," 1999, private collection). Both artists worked from the cupola of a home in Chadds Ford known as Painter’s Folly, once owned by artist Howard Pyle and later by the Sipala family, friends of the Wyeths. In the photograph, Welling manipulates the scene by shooting "day for night," a technique which simulates a nighttime scene though it is shot in the daylight.