Isle of Wyeth

On Southern Island, painter Jamie Wyeth lives and works in the old keeper’s house, built in 1858. The only house on the island, it is connected by a passageway to the brick lighthouse, now painted white like the house. He rows the half mile to his mainland home in Tenants Harbor when he needs to connect with the rest of the world.

Fall and winter might find him at his place on Monhegan where he lived for years until the bustle of that island sent him to this more solitary one, where “he could achieve the focus he finds necessary for his work.” He also maintains a home and studio in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where he grew up, playing, eating, and painting in his father’s studio.

He is the son of painter Andrew Wyeth and the grandson of illustrator N. C. Wyeth, and from his first days has lived a life shaped by paint and point of view, a boisterous, funny, driven family, and the coast of Maine. From the age of 12, when he asked to be homeschooled, he spent eight hours a day studying, sketching, and painting. By 18, his paintings were held by the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Wilmington Society of Art, and private collectors. At 20, he had his first one-man exhibition in New York City (around the time he married his wife of 40 years, Phyllis, who would become the subject of many of his paintings), and, just shy of 30, his first retrospective.

Wyeth is a self-described “recorder.” Sometimes that means he’s hunkered down on his island in a colony of gulls painting their stories; at other times he’s been recording historical events, like the Watergate hearings, as they unfold. Conversations in paint, his portraits include the not so famous and the famous, including John F. Kennedy, dancer Rudolf Nureyev, and mentors Andy Warhol and Lincoln Kirstein, founder of the New York City Ballet.

He holds honorary degrees from seven colleges and his works are in many public collections, including the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the John F. Kennedy Library. He has exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, from Alaska and Maine to Italy and Japan. He works all day every day—it’s all he wants to do—creating faces in shadow and light, worn doors, lighthouses and rocks, trees and fields, ravens, whole worlds of enigma and obtuse stories, the paradoxes in the human condition. The eyes—whether of the half-lidded Nureyev or the beady gull—insist we pay attention to the animal in the human, the human in the animal.

In his series Seven Deadly Sins, Wyeth applies his distinctive, deep, and dark point of view to the subject of human frailty—pride, envy, anger, sloth, lust, and gluttony—through one of his signature subjects, seagulls. The exhibit is currently at the Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland through August 30.

Where do you paint?
I paint everywhere. I paint outside. I paint in the bathroom. When I’m on Monhegan, I paint in a box. I find it too difficult to paint with people watching me, so the fishermen created a bait box, set it on its side, and I sit in it. I move it around wherever I’m working. I think people ignore a box, or if they see a person inside it, they think, good God, how strange, and walk on. [He laughs.]

What was it like growing up in a world of painting?
My life to me was just totally normal. Nothing odd about it. We lived in my father’s studio. We ate breakfast practically on his palette, you know. But I have an older brother who grew up in the same thing and he ate the same eggs and bacon and he really had no interest in painting. Now he’s a[n art] dealer.

His daughter is the only grandchild of your dad, Andrew Wyeth.
Victoria, yeah. Full of hell. Oh my god, she’s unbelievable. She goes around the country where we’re having shows and gives lectures. Of course, most of it is family stories. We’ve always told her, “Vic, what you don’t know, just make it up.”

You clearly see the funny side of things. What was the role of humor growing up?
Very big. Halloween is a national holiday in my family. Even now. One excuse we can dress up and wear makeup. We do anyway other times, but we can go out in public at Halloween. We have a lot of fun and laugh a lot.

Much of your work feels as if it’s a place between places, that there’s an underlying darkness.
Life is tough. It’s edgy. What interests me is to go beyond the surface and the physiognomy of something. And I hope it comes out in my work. I paint a lot of animals. I paint a lot of birds. It’s very easy to “cutify” that. I don’t.

You started painting early on.
Probably like any child I’d go to the movies and come back and draw what I’d seen. I read books and sort of illustrated them. I was with my father who was painting dead crows and fields, but what excited me was my grandfather’s studio. He died before I was born, but there was this enormous studio full of incredible costumes, illustrations of pirates and Robin Hood, huge scaffolds for the murals, and it’s all there, even now, as if he’d just walked out of it this morning. It was magical, what he created in his head, without traveling much.

You like to stay home, too.
Pretty much. Nothing interests me less than scenes, or interesting faces or interesting trees. What does interest me are faces that I know or trees that I know.

What makes a good model?
There really isn’t a good model. It’s being with them, eating with them. It’s a culmination of things. A camera is an instant. Painting is a lot of moods, a lot of different light, different days, an amalgam. It’s my interpretation of that person, that raven, that seagull.

So there’s a certain level of intimacy?
Yeah, intimacy. I’m trying to remove myself. I compare it to acting in a way, where you become the person, the gull. I become obsessed with the subject.

This new show, Seven Deadly Sins, is gulls, again. What is it about them that draws you?
They’re ready models. The one thing that’s on my island are seagulls. If I’m there, they’re there. Now they’ll sleep while I’m sitting there. I think they view me as a seagull. People say, “When in the hell are you going to get off the seagulls?” Probably never. I may spend the rest of my life with them. Out of that you can enter all sorts of worlds.

How do you begin a painting?
I dream about it a lot. Some of my early drawings of a subject aren’t recognizable to anybody else. It may just be a line on a page, but that expresses something to me.

Many of your pieces are labeled “combined mediums.”
I made that up—combined mediums. I use charcoal, I use ink, I use pencil, I use oils and watercolor—and sometimes it’s very thick watercolor. I use dirt. I grab sticks to use. A brush is just a stick with some hair on the end of it. But, actually, I work mostly with my fingers, and I love fingernails. [He holds up his hands, his fingers stained a dark green.] Your only limitation is yourself. Take the material and do what you want, do what you need to do with it.

You also often work on toned board. What is that?
I have paper made for me with a brownish color in it like cardboard. I love cardboard. When I did the Nureyev stuff, I discovered cardboard. Here was this amazing world of ballet, everything so magical, beautiful, and I was doing these things on cardboard that was just lying around. But the problem with it is it eats itself up. I’m still looking for brown archival cardboard. The smallest special order I can find is 50,000 sheets of 60 by 40. Five lifetimes of cardboard! I couldn’t burn that much.

Do you ever get painter’s block?
Not yet, thank God. I can’t imagine it. There are so many things I want to do I’m about to explode.

New things?
Oh, sure. Even this show, the Seven Deadly Sins, I’m making huge banners for it that are 17 feet by 10 feet. I want it to be like a carnival, a side show, sort of “pass at your own risk.”

What was your biggest influence?
As a painter, probably my grandfather, but my father was a huge influence on me. We had an amazing relationship, where the father and son thing went out the window. He was somebody I completely relied on to be honest about my work. We had nothing to gain from one another.

Your dad recently passed. Any words of advice he always said to you growing up?
Just “Give ’em hell!” [He laughs.] Those were kind of his last words to me, actually, “Give ’em hell!”