The grass withers, the flower fades

Over a career spanning seven decades, Andrew Wyeth created one of the most enigmatic bodies of artwork produced in the United States. His mysterious paintings depict a private world of silence and stillness. Wyeth’s subjects are unassuming and unusual: a lonely sandbank, an abandoned rowboat in a field, a corner of an empty room. His portraits often contain more empty space than sitter, and they frequently include strange objects which hint at narratives just out of reach. Wyeth was a meticulous craftsman with a keen eye for details, yet he himself described his paintings as “abstractions,” despite their obvious realism.

Wyeth rarely explained his pictures, preferring to let their ambiguity incite his viewers to their own reveries. But for one painting, Trodden Weed (1951), he did supply an origin story. While undergoing lung surgery, he went into cardiac arrest. During the episode Wyeth imagined a figure of death chasing him, which disappeared when the doctors revived him. While convalescing and walking around the hills near his home he realized that every time he took a step he was crushing the life out of the bugs and plants underfoot. The two episodes met together in his mind and inspired him to create this painting.

Wyeth’s painting is an example of the genre of vanitas, paintings which consider the frailty of human life and the inevitability of death. Skulls, snuffed candles, withering bouquets of flowers—these are the usual symbols of the vanitas genre; and although these symbols are easily understood, their repetition can sometimes lead to vanitas paintings becoming hackneyed. A painting of a human skull can reliably conjure thoughts of death, but how far do those thoughts go? After the symbol has provoked the expected response, it is easy to move on to thoughts of something else.

What Wyeth does in Trodden Weed is different. It takes more than a fleeting glance to apprehend the broken stalk of weed, blending into the rest of the bleak winter landscape Wyeth depicts. Once it is found, though, it stands out distinctly; rendering all the more poignant its abrupt brokenness, struck down suddenly by the heavy tread of Wyeth’s own boots—a stand-in for death.

The unsettling nature of this painting is emphasized by the odd viewpoint used by Wyeth. The horizon is very high (a tiny bit of the distant winter landscape is visible in the upper right) yet the angle of view is from above; not much can be seen other than the high boots of the figure of death, rushing across the withered field with long strides, and the weed that has been destroyed in his wake. The odd angle and perspective take this painting further away from the stereotypical vanitas image. This painting is not a tidy cliché. It speaks to something we’d rather not think about: that death is unpredictable and can come on us without warning.

The highly personal nature of Wyeth’s near-death experience renders his painting even more poignant. The 20th century was one of widespread destruction: Millions of people died in wars, famines, and natural disasters. If Wyeth had painted an abstracted, generalized picture of death—akin to the usual vanitas imagery—he could have easily fallen into cliché. But the personal nature of his symbolism gives Trodden Weed an immediacy and effectiveness. Wyeth is painting from the heart here. Death is something every person must contend with; there is no ignoring its reality or rendering it safe via stereotyped imagery.

Scripture contains numerous reminders of the reality of death. Wyeth’s picture evokes Luke 12:16–21, where Jesus tells a parable of a rich man who was planning to retire in the alleged security that his possessions would afford him. In the parable God sharply rebukes him: “Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided?” It’s easy to imagine the weed—impetuously rising higher than every other plant in Wyeth’s field—as suggesting the prideful rich man of the parable, cut down suddenly. Yet despite its pervasiveness in our world, death is no match for the risen Christ, who conquered death on the cross. Unsettling as it is, Wyeth’s Trodden Weed does not depict an invincible enemy.

—William Collen is an independent researcher who writes RUINS, a Substack blog discussing art and aesthetics from a Christian perspective