Art History Challenge Has People Recreating Art With Everyday Items

Art History Challenge Has People Recreating Art With Everyday Items

Betsy Wyeth - 1921 - 2020 Her world

We received this morning from the Farnsworth Art Museum and Wyeth Center - Rockland's world class  institution - a page devoted to Betsy Wyeth, Andrews's wife who has died at 98.

Watch the video Betsy's World which features her sons Nicky and James, and family friend and legendary Maine photographer Peter Ralston.

In recent years she has lived in the summer at Georges Harbor on Benner Island.  It is a magic spot where she built a house, commuted on her boat Home Run, and composed the fishing village of dreams across the narrow cut - the  Allen Island Sea Station - where in 1907 Maine marked its tercentennial with the granite Weymouth Cross on a bluff.  You can see that spot below and in this post which I put up to mark Andrew's death and attempted to capture the light for which he is famous.  I often saw James visiting Mommy, arriving via his black 40 footer Dreadnought.

In 1993, recovering from a flu, and needing a refuge we saw an ad in the Times for a house in Friendship, Maine.  I remembered sailing in Hempstead Harbor with my Dad on his friend Lou Perretti's Friendship sloop as a boy.  We rented the house and sailed aboard Gladiator (below). Fifteen years later we bought our house across the creek from the Zubers who are still sailing Gladiator - now 120 years old!

But I digress...what I didn't know is that we were entering Wyeth World.  Betsy's world, its light and sounds captured in the (now familiar) shots taken in Cushing - where we drive past their house on the way to the supermarket - the Olsen House now a museum where Andrew is buried in the local family graveyard across the road, and Southern Island which Betsy restored for James and his late wife Phyllis, remembered HERE.  Watch the video! - gwc

Betsy Wyeth (1921 - 2020)

Her room

Betsy's World from Farnsworth Art Museum on Vimeo.

Costello

I received these photos this morning from Ancestry.com.  They probably got them from Martin Robillard.  

It is the Costello family grave at Holy Cross Cemetery, Brooklyn. Placed by my great grandfather Thomas Costello in memory of his wife Bridget Slattery (1919 - Spanish flu?), himself (1938 - at 85 - the last arrival from Ireland i/a 1863)  Dad was 18 at the time of hisdeath and Thomas lived with them in Gerritsen Beach.

Agnes, his sister, I faintly remember or maybe just talk of her, Nana, Grandaddy, and Josephine's son Paul who died at 1 y.o.

The deed is signed by Bishop (later Archbishop) for whom the highs school in Queens was named when school moved from St. Ann's parish in Brooklyn to Jamaica.  that's why the name of their teams long a powerhouse - is the Stanners.

- GWC