In her essay Andrew Wyeth’s Language of Things, Anne Classen Knutson writes that Andrew Wyeth’s later work “becomes even more evocative of both human presence and human mortality” than ever before (Knutson, 57). Such playing with the relationship between the presence and absence of life–– a sort of existential reckoning made physical through paint–– is exactly the quality which makes Searchlight so potent. Wyeth painted this watercolor in 1986, in the latter part of an impressively long and impressively successful career. Taking into consideration the painting’s shared title and subject matter of a powerful searchlight, as well as Wyeth’s likening of “houses to human bodies,” the painting becomes a metaphoric, introspective exploration into the intersection between the manmade and the natural (Knutson, 68).

Central to Searchlight is a long, eggshell-white building, studded with unevenly spaced windows and cast simultaneously in bright light and dramatic shadow. Wyeth has made the building monumental; unable to be contained within the bounds of the painting, it seems it could go on forever. Reflecting on the painting’s creation, Wyeth wrote that “the lights of [his] car suddenly hit this building, and [he] simply had to paint the almost mystical image” (Wyeth for Connoisseur Magazine, December 1990). Indeed, Searchlight has that surreal, straight-from-a-dream quality which makes Wyeth’s work so compelling, and which blurs the boundaries between realism and magical realism. As Knutson observes, some of the painting’s mystique stems from the way that “Wyeth often uses the befuddling quality of moonlight to transform ordinary objects into extraordinary things” (57). Although in Searchlight, the source of light is not the moon, but rather Wyeth’s car, it functions in much the same ‘befuddling’ way, mutating the mundane building and tree into strange, alien objects. In particular, the tree, described by Wyeth as “brooding,” casts a shadow that appears more like a many-armed figure or a dream creation than what we might expect from a tree. Perhaps it was this very parallelism between moonlight and car-light that so struck Wyeth and led him to see the scene as otherworldly. “There’s something more in this,” he wrote, than in his “watercolors of the house in the late afternoon with the sun and shadows.”

Wyeth’s personifying treatment of the house, “lending [its façade] an anthropomorphic quality,” also contributes to Searchlight’s surreal atmosphere (Knutson, 68). Wyeth wrote that when drawing or painting a structure, he “literally put the building together as if [he] were the builder.” Here, Wyeth is not only a builder but a sort of Dr. Frankenstein, turning windows into eyes and mouths, wide open in the glare of the headlights. Wyeth’s manipulation of light so that it becomes at the same time “illumination, color, atmosphere, structure, and emotion,” also furthers the almost human quality of the house–– Wyeth paints the façade as if he were painting a portrait, taking care to depict each imperfection, each line, and each shift between light and shadow (Thomas Hoving, “Introduction” in Andrew Wyeth: Autobiography, 14).

Furthermore, Searchlight is a painting that is deeply rooted in Wyeth’s “expression of self” (Kathleen A. Foster, “Meaning and Medium in Wyeth’s Art: Revisiting Groundhog Day” in Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic, 93). Where his temperas function almost like amber, trapping and preserving, instead of insects, Wyeth’s impressions and memories, his watercolors allow for movement, recognizing that some moments should be permitted their transience. The freeness of watercolor functions similarly to how “the invisibility of the artist is an integral part of Wyeth’s creative process,” enabling “the things he paints [to] come to life” (Knutson, 53). In Searchlight, watercolor and the invisibility of the artist work in tandem, empowering the scene to stand on its own as something alive and breathing and in motion, like–– as put by Wyeth–– “that abstract flash… you caught out of the corner of your eye.”

In Searchlight, the juxtaposition of human presence with human absence is an omnipresence: the manufactured, glaring light from the car and the wholly organic darkness of the greenish-black night sky; the implied rather than physical existence of the Wyeth as both driver and artist; the at once observed and constructed scene. “This one is not the 'decisive moment,’” Wyeth remarked, and indeed, Searchlight is a kind of ongoing and many-layered story, one that captures the ‘deer-in-headlights’ feeling, that instant of surprise in which one sees their life flash in front of them and must confront everything all at once. If Searchlight is anexploration into the intersection between the manmade and the natural, we come away from it with the impression that what lies at this overlap is the self, that imperfect but ever-fascinating combination of nature and nurture.