JAMIE WYETH: ISLAND OCCURRENCES By Michael Clawson
In an exclusive interview, Jamie Wyeth discusses his Maine island sanctuary and new works now on view at Farnsworth Art Museum.
Twelve nautical miles off the coast of Maine sits Monhegan Island, a rock that juts out of the Atlantic measuring just 4½ square miles. Though the population is less than 100 people, the island is home to a curious lot. There’s a Rockefeller on a porch, a squealing man with a lobster bib, a World War II POW, a communist artist and vicious seagulls.
And artists. Lots of artists. Some of the best. George Bellows, Robert Henri, Edward Hopper, Edward Willis Redfield. All ghosts, except for one. Jamie Wyeth. The painter— son of Andrew Wyeth, grandson of N.C. Wyeth—maintains a home and studio on the island where he paints some of the locals and gets lost amid the mist of the sea and the fog of time.
“It’s quite fantastic living here, which I guess is the problem—too many people are thinking the same way. During the
winter there’s maybe five families on the island, but then summer rolls around and it balloons to hundreds of people, mostly day trippers,” the 76-year-old Wyeth says. “It’s physically spectacular. You’re just out here in the middle of the Atlantic. I have a house here, where I avoid the crowds inside my box where I work.”
Wyeth, who is certainly one of the most famous American artists living today, has turned his attention to Monhegan Island for nearly a decade, during which time he’s made work after work that speaks to the curious rock that he calls home. The Monhegan paintings, as well as many
others, are now on view in Jamie Wyeth: Untoward Occurrences and Other Things, a new exhibition at Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. “In theory any small town like this will have stories or tall tales, and whether they are true or not is sort of irrelevant because they become part of the island lore,” he says. “I’ve been fascinated to create these things. My grandfather painted one big painting here, and my father came out several times with me and he did some watercolors, but I’ve been the one who’s mostly painted here. For me, I think, the island is an equalizer, and it has a history with painters, including Rockwell Kent, who I’m very fond of.”
Kent was a New York-based painter, muralist and printmaker who worked throughout much of the 20th century in all parts of the world, but particularly in the American Northeast. He died in 1971, still relatively unknown to the art world due in some small part to the Red Scare and McCarthyism of the 1950s. The painter was a socialist, and socialists tended to get lumped in with communists during that time and in many ways his career suffered from it. Today Wyeth works in the home Kent built for his mother on Monhegan Island.
“His socialism sort of started there, because he was told he couldn’t paint the house unless he built it, or he couldn’t paint fishermen until he fished. And that was the beginning for him,” Wyeth says. “I never met him, because he was much older than me, but I did correspond with him at a very young age and I did go on many quests to buy some of his work, especially the Monhegan works. He’s the only painter that could catch that primeval quality of the island. The problem with painting in Maine in general is that work
tends to be very emblematic of the region, crab traps and such. He captured something different here.”
Wyeth paints Kent in several new works in the show, including two sailing scenes in front of Monhegan’s shore cliffs, and in Portrait of Rockwell Kent—Second in a Suite of Untoward Occurrences on Monhegan Island, a work done in enamel, gesso and oil on composite board. Kent, in a striped red coat and brown scarf, stands in the snow with his palette and brushes. Behind him is a tall cliff and a woman plunging headfirst off it. Like many of the works in the show, the falling woman is part of the island lore that involves Kent, an affair and either a murder or a suicide. After Wyeth finished the piece in 2013, the painting triggered a mild public outcry about the story of the falling woman, enough to make the Maine attorney general re-open the 70-yearold cold case. The investigation went nowhere, but sensationalized the regional news for a brief period.
Many years ago, Wyeth and his father had tried to stage an exhibition of Kent’s works, many of which are in Russia today. Kent, because of his political beliefs, was the only American painter shown in state museums in Soviet-era Russia. “I once traveled to the Soviet Union some time ago and I was going to give a speech. The state department wanted to review my speech, and they asked me to take out the references I made to Rockwell Kent. Sen. [Ted] Kennedy was a friend of mine and he told me to screw it and say I’ll
remove them but then give the speech how I wanted,” Wyeth says. “Later, my father and I were there together, and we wanted to try to get some of Kent’s work for a show and we met with [Mikhail] Gorbachev personally to talk about it, though we never did get the paintings.”
Other works in the show include Berg, a 2011 painting in gesso, gouache and watercolor that shows icebergs floating silently off the coast. “That one was born out of the danger of the sea and the winters. I would row back and forth to my island, about a mile off shore. Later I would switch to powerboats, but I was rowing one day and I slammed into an iceberg,” he says. “It comes from the terror and fear of the ocean.”
The work has a mesmerizing quality to the paint with its ethereal blues and whites that swirl on the painting’s surface. The water and ice, here rendered almost sculpturally, share qualities with the deepest point in space—vast, dark, cold and utterly horrifying. Many works in the show reveal Wyeth’s exceptional paint quality and his ability to turn drips and dabs into emotional resonance. Consider My Mother and the Squall, a 2016 work that has a churning ocean bubbling with frothy whitecaps, or Mr. Rockefeller on my Porch—Ninth in a series of Untoward Occurrences on Monhegan Island, which blends oils and watercolors into a vaporous and metallic concoction that seems to sit still wet on the canvas. “I’m a terrible technician,” Wyeth adds. “But I do like to try different things.”
The artist turns to a familiar name within the Wyeth history for The duPonts of Delaware, a masterful, and quite large, painting that shows a train derailment near the Xanadu-like castle of the du Pont estate. The two families go back nearly a century: they were neighbors on the Pennsylvania-Delaware border, they admired and collected art together, and Nathaniel Wyeth, Jamie’s uncle, was an early engineer and inventor at DuPont, the massive chemical company founded by the family. Also, the artist’s late wife, Phyllis, was a du Pont. “We lived in the same area and that’s my farm down on the left. That train wreck actually happened and then I just added that big du Pont house in the back,” Wyeth says. “If you look closely that’s a DuPont chemical car off the tracks there.”
Other works in the show include one of Wyeth’s popular seagull paintings—“Other artists paint them like doves, but they’re thieves and scavengers,
vicious,” he adds—and a life-size painting of Andy Warhol on a “folk art” screen door. Warhol and Wyeth were close friends and, famously in 1975, they traded portraits of each other. Wyeth’s image of the pop art superstar has since become one of his most recognized works. For this new piece, Wyeth took the original measurements he made of Warhol in 1975 and used them on his found object. “He was a great friend, but also a very shy person. He was more comfortable behind the screen door than opening it to greet people,” the artist says.
In addition to Untoward Occurrences and Other Things, the Farnsworth will also be showing Phyllis Mills Wyeth: A Celebration, a memorial to the artist’s wife and frequent model, who died in January. “I started getting calls and I told everyone no memorial services or none of that crap. So they came up with this,” Wyeth says. “They did a beautiful job. I hadn’t realized I painted her so much.”
These days there are always new things on his easel, and he’s unlikely to let anything change that. “Thank god, every day I’m still excited. The opiate for me is when things do come to life and start clicking,” he says. “I’ve never had writer’s block, that’s for sure. I’m mostly just excited about recording things. If I stop painting and start theorizing things, it all starts freezing into place. I also always have a million things going on, and I hate talking about them until they’re done. My wife’s death has been a terrible setback, and painting became difficult, but there is always something on the easel.”
Wyeth recalls visiting his grandfather’s studio, and taking note of the items that the great artist-illustrator had near his easel. “There was scaffolding and lots of studio items, including costumes and props and all sorts of things. What was funny was N.C. never went to the Caribbean for Treasure Island or Europe for Robin Hood. The countryside in those paintings is all Chadds Ford,” Wyeth says. “And then you wander over to Andrew’s studio and it was just four walls. It really shows you that you can be creative in any environment, no matter where that is.”
For N.C. it was Chadds Ford, in a room full of the makings of art and story. For Andrew it was four walls and some windows.
For Jamie it’s Monhegan Island, or wherever he decides to set his easel.