Andrew Wyeth’s planning process is famously meticulous and extensive, sometimes spanning across dozens of pencil and watercolor studies in the way of the Renaissance artistic tradition. Wyeth used these studies, some detailed, others little more than a few sweeping gestural strokes, as a journey on which he embarked in order to achieve a deep grasp of his subject matter through experimentation with light, shadow, composition, and texture. Nogeeshik is an example of one such step in Wyeth’s “refining and transforming” process, which, as argued by Anne Knutson, is “crucial to understanding and fully appreciating his work” (Anne Knutson, “Andrew Wyeth’s Language of Things” in Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic, 38).

The attentively drawn face is that of Nogeeshik Aquash, an Ojibwa activist who came to Wyeth to ask the artist for his financial support for a First Nations school. Wyeth recalled that:

“It was in the winter and there was a storm – God, it was spitting snow – and

there was a knock on the door of the Mill house and here was this extraordinary

Indian, standing out there in the snow. And I let him in. He had this most

compelling, deep, rumbling voice. He wanted money for his Indian reservation

in Canada. He was just making the tour of New England and he’d heard about

me so he’d dropped by. I said I’d give him some. And did. And I demanded he

come back early the next spring because I wanted to do a portrait – a head. Just

for my own interest. My father had done so many paintings of Indians –

especially when he painted The Last of the Mohicans. On the first day of May,

there was a knock on the door and there he was. We had a great time in the

studio. The only problem he had was firewater and women…”

Nogeeshik lived with the Wyeths for a time at their home in Chadds Ford. After his departure, Nogeeshik participated in the siege of Wounded Knee in South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where he also married his fellow activist Anna Mae Aquash.

Nogeeshik is shown here from a three-quarters view, as opposed to the forward-facing gaze which appears in the final tempera (Nogeeshik, 1972). Yet another drawing, Nogeeshik Aquash (1971), depicts Nogeeshik in profile, facing left. In Nogeeshik (preliminary drawing), 1972, Nogeeshik’s eyes are slightly narrowed and affixed on a point in the distance, his brows furrowed in concentration. His hair hangs long and loose, its texture and softness rendered with a tactile precision. His cheekbones are high, and his jaw is sharply defined. Wyeth wrote that to him, “pencil drawing is a very emotional, very quick, very abrupt medium.” Sometimes, “[his] hand, almost [his] fingertips, [began] to shiver,” affecting “the quality of the lead pencil on the paper” and allowing it to “move…to pull itself out of the blank piece of paper.” Indeed, although Wyeth changed much in his final execution of Nogeeshik’s portrait, the drawing shares the completed tempera’s arresting gaze and statuesque surety that bring the work to life.

The vitality of the drawing stems not only from Wyeth’s mastery of the pencil, but also from Wyeth’s state of mind during the drawing process. His drawings are “about excitement, imagination, and investigation,” (Kathleen A. Foster, “Meaning and Medium in Wyeth’s Art: Revisiting Groundhog Day” in Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic, 88) and this is more than apparent in Nogeeshik, in which the subject is someone whom Wyeth felt passionately about. The sense of exploration, of really coming to know the sitter, is clear in Nogeeshik through a fluidity that is not easily achieved in pencil. As with tempera, which needs to be built up, “as if…building the earth itself,” the drafting process is one of construction, an additive and clarity-giving method (Joyce Hill Stoner, “Embedded Meanings: The Last Tempera” in Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect, 201).

The figure of Nogeeshik functions as “a vehicle for exploring… manly pride and stoicism…the very antiquity of this land” (Wanda M. Corn, The Art of Andrew Wyeth, 147). The decision in the final portrait to use a frontal view of Nogeeshik cements the power of this concept and the power of Nogeeshik himself. However, if not for Nogeeshik and the other preliminary drawings Wyeth completed of the same subject, the ultimate effect would not be nearly so striking. As Wyeth said of his drafting process, “you have to lean over a little to the left, and overdo it a bit, and then come back into balance” (Andrew Wyeth, quoted in Virginia O’Hara, Andrew Wyeth’s Ides of March: The Making of a Masterpiece, 35).