MAINE, Maine — On a perfect June morning, the sky and the sea were nearly identical shades of blue. Beside what looked to be a freshly painted white lighthouse, a cannon shot could be heard across the water.
Welcome to Jamie Wyeth’s world.
The acclaimed artist lives part of each year in the old lightkeeper’s house on Southern Island, just outside Tenants Harbor, alternating between that home and another on Monhegan Island.
“As someone said, it's like running away with the circus,” laughed Wyeth as he gave a tour of the 22-acre island. “You live in a lighthouse? Good God, what more could you ask? To be next to the ocean.”
This particular lighthouse has been part of Wyeth’s life for some 60 years. His parents owned the island before he did, and Jamie said he would visit as a teenager. It has also inspired several paintings, as it did for his father.
“I thought when I first got this island, I thought Jesus, my father had painted so many wonderful things, I’m going to be living in an Andrew Wyeth painting, said Jamie. “And then I found my own interpretation.”
Some of that view is represented in a new exhibit opening July 4 at the Wyeth Center, at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland. The exhibit is titled “Jamie Wyeth—Unsettled”, and features a number of unusual works by the artist, some reflecting an edgier view of the subjects and the world, some melancholy, and some possibly uncomfortable.
Wyeth says some of that comes from his own life.
“My life is a bit unsettled. I lost my father, my mother, and then my wife, my partner in the space of a few years. That was a huge shock, so the work revolves on that. If you see them they are quite different.”
Wyeth’s art career began early. He said as a child, he wanted to paint like his famous father Andrew, and grandfather N.C. Wyeth. He persuaded his parents to let him leave school in the 6th grade and have a home tutor so he could pursue painting.
“My first exhibition was in New York when I was 18 or 19, and that was a pretty big success,” he recalled.
As the son of one of the country’s best-known painters, Wyeth was getting noticed, which led to a commission from the Kennedy family to paint a portrait of the late President Kennedy. Wyeth was just 21 years old at the time and said the pensive image of JFK caused an uproar, even within the Kennedy family, because some liked it and some did not. The painting, however, ended up some years later at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Wyeth said it's an example of how sometimes a painting can touch the artist himself on an emotional level.
“When the thing comes alive, and all of a sudden breathes and looks at you and so forth. There is no bigger high than that. But it's rare…. like the Kennedy portrait. I had a hell of a time with that, and then it all of a sudden became alive. I expected to see a limousine sitting there and the Secret Service. That’s how convinced I got.”
Wyeth said he still tries to paint every day, in one of his several studios, and still does portraits. Currently, he is working on a portrait of his friend, the late businesswoman Linda Bean.
His place in American art assured, Wyeth, now 77, said working every day is part of his life. The ideas and urge to create may come from the world around him, his own mind, or a combination—such as when he used seagulls to represent the Seven Deadly Sins.
“I don’t cutify them I hope I don’t, or Disneyfy them. Because they can be rather scary and mean and that’s an interesting side to them."
Among the paintings in the new exhibit, there is one of a seagull.
The Exhibit, “Unsettled," opens July 4 at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland and runs through late September. It was assembled and curated by the Brandywine Museum in Pennsylvania, which is the other center for the works of the Wyeth family. After Rockland, the show will move on to three other U.S. cities.
