How does one adapt to a hostile world? Four brief sentences from a biography of renowned American illustrator and painter Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945) provide a tiny peek at how one man faced four battles none of us will escape.
When 18-year-old N.C. Wyeth enrolled in the Massachusetts Normal Art School, he immediately encountered the first conflict, an obstacle to his career aspirations.
"But Convers found no light… no one to remind him that art and life are incorporate, that to grow in artistic power he must grow in character." But how could he grow without life experience?
Six years later the problem began to resolve as he surveyed his second battlefield: family struggles. Though apparently healthy at birth, little Carolyn, his first child, lived just five days.
Wyeth later assessed this trauma. "The great sorrow has been to me one of the greatest things that ever took place in my life."
The common denominators of sorrow and disappointment comprise the great forge where the hammer of contrary circumstance beats out character on the anvil of pain. And in the wake of despair, Wyeth's battle to revive his deadened inner being intensified.
Then after a brief two years, "his senses came back to life as he walked the warm meadows and felt the air on his skin and watched blackbirds flock through the trees."
Soul and spirit seek revival, moments of respite and resurrection, and Wyeth discovered solace in nature.
Thus matured in his craft, he embarked upon illustrating Robert Louis Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND. Some consider the haunting, moonlit visage of Blind Pew, giant hand viciously groping for young Jim Hawkins, as one of Wyeth's greatest works.
Another foe–change–badgered him repeatedly. Though initially eschewing progress, he acquired his first automobile at age 29, envisioning pleasures this new conveyance would enable for him and his family.
"But in no time at all, he saw that the new machine 'dragged me away from the little things I love so much–the quiet amble in the evening, the pause by the brook, the sound of the birds and wind.'" The car went back in a week.
Career challenges. Family struggles. Deadness within. Unwanted change. Is there protection, any place to flee from these hostilities?
Though oft afflicted but never defeated, the natural world persists unchanged and undaunted, the quite voice of God whispering peace to troubled souls, no matter what their battles. I heard it today in the swishing spray from the garden hose.
The musical rattle of leaves under the water jets encourage the serpentine inching of pumpkin vines through the tangled beds. And I inch along myself, one battle supplanting another, seeking my own path through the tangles.
I need not seek conflicts; they find me in due course. But the whisper from the created universe is one of hope: "There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven." Listen… and feel… and learn.
Copyright 2004 James McAlister
Recent Comments