It’s weird advice that always works: If you’re feeling sad, go see some art. When the news sucks and nothing seems okay, sometimes just getting outside, getting yourself to the museum or gallery, and looking at something someone made with their hands and their brain on a wall and not a computer screen will at least get you thinking differently. Portland’s full of places to do this. Here are a few to get you started.
The Wyeths: Three Generations at the Portland Art Museum
Even if you don’t know Andrew Wyeth by name, you’ve probably seen one of his most well known paintings, “Christina’s World”: In spindly, near-photorealistic strokes and a washed-out color palette, a woman is seen from behind, her dress a cottony whitish-pink, strands of her dark hair caught in the wind, one sharp elbow extending outward at a visibly uncomfortable angle. At the horizon line, a house and a barn jut out from the place where the faded, once-green ground meets the anemic, barely blue sky. The buildings are likely not far from the painting’s subject, but they seem miles away. It’s an instantly evocative image, the kind of painting it’s worth seeing up close, that commands your attention, that all but begs you to lose yourself in its slender, un-fancy details, its meticulous composition. The framing sets up an expectation of narrative, but leaves the viewer to fill in the details. Wyeth’s world is one of magical realism; it infuses ordinary subject matter with a sense of mystery and David Lynch-esque dislocation. It’s not surrealist work by any stretch—it’s grounded in reality, no one has more than one nose, it’s clearly figurative, etc.—but nonetheless there’s something unsettling about it.