repeated subjects include tree trunks, and their exposed tangled roots, or tree stumps. Since the 1970s, Wyeth has often painted on corrugated cardboard, liking the rough striated effect cardboard gives his paintings and now using an archival variant as a substrate. Wyeth has also depicted cardboard itself in conventional canvas paintings, such as the painting 10W30 (1981), depicting a pair of chickens nesting in a discarded carton that once had held 10W30 grade engine oil. He also uses thick, opaque watercolor pigments, straight from the tube, creating effects similar to oil paints. To minimize interruptions while painting outdoors, Wyeth paints from within an unassuming, weathered fish bait box, much like a hunter uses a hunting blind. Works Early With advice from his father, always his closest friend but always frank, Wyeth quickly developed his technique and style. In 1963, at the age of 17, he painted Portrait of Shorty, a bravura minutely detailed portrait of a local railroad worker. Shorty was a man who lived for 20 years in Chadds Ford, in a humble hut as a hermit, only speaking with a local store owner. The composition of an unshaven Shorty against an elegant wing chair is unexpected. Joyce Hill Stoner, art historian and paintings conservator, found it has the "exactitude characteristic of sixteenth-century German oil technique". Lincoln Kirstein, a family friend of the Wyeth family, was the subject of his first major portrait of a prominent person, titled appropriately, Portrait of Lincoln Kirstein. Kirstein was impressed by the portrait, and declared Wyeth the finest American portrait painter since John Singer Sargent. Kerstein's quote made it into the catalog for his first one-man exhibition, at the Knoedler Gallery in New York in 1966. Landscapes and portraits of people from the Chadds Ford area were presented at the exhibit. "Eyewitness to Space" From 1966 to 1971, Wyeth served in the Delaware Air National Guard. Although at one point he was scheduled for immediate deployment to the Vietnam War, flights were cancelled for noncombatants. During that period, he painted Adam and Eve and the C-97 (1969), depicting the Biblical couple astonished by a Boeing C-97 Stratofreighter cargo plane flying overhead. The painting was executed using military-standard oil paint on a piece of parachute cloth measuring . His assignment changed when he was granted top security clearance and took part in "Eyewitness to Space", a program jointly sponsored by NASA and the National