Christina's World

Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth

I've been staring at this all day. I have no vocabulary for this sort of art. My grammar is entirely literary and cinematic. I can say this looks like an image from a Terrance Malick film, for instance; and if I had never seen this painting and someone told me it looked like something from Days of Heaven, I'd have had a surprisingly accurate, though admittedly rough, sense of its feeling--of its loneliness, its pathos, its desperate beauty. But the still, mute force of an image like this... I'm not equipped to write about it. All I can do is sit in front of it all day.