Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life

  O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention. 
~William Shakespeare 

Posing for Wyeth transformed Helga's life, gave it meaning and significance. "I became alive. It shows in the pictures. I became young overnight. I've never done anything more worthwhile." The experience unfurled the artist she had always felt in herself. She explains: "My mother tried to tell (my husband) many times, 'Helga is supersensitive. If you do not realize this, you're going to lose her.' He never got to the creative me that needed to be nourished. I was starving at home for doing something like this. I wasn't born just to be a housewife. That bored me. I was brought up in the art world, and I knew it."
(Helga's) walk home after posing "was something that nobody can even talk about, it was just so emotional, the richness of what I was thinking can never be recorded. I even regretted walking because I didn't want to be disturbed. I was like a deer. I was like a hunted animal."

"When Andy paints you it's a romance to the degree where you're the most important thing in the world to him. There's a whole string of models that really weren't able to cope with it because they believed it, and if you believe it, you don't cope with it. He gives you one hundred percent, but there's two hundred percent there and he keeps the other one hundred percent. You can't take that home with you. You have to separate it and stop right there.
When he's done with you, when he pulls the goddamn stakes up and the tent is taken down, there is nothing but a bare spot and the wind's howling and you're out there in the middle of the bare spot and he's gone."