Jamie Wyeth is a contemporary American artist and realist painter. Though many of his works depict the Maine coast, animals, and wildlife, Wyeth has also painted portraits of politicians and social media figures, including President John F. Kennedy, Rudolf Nureyev, Andy Warhol, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. His style is notable for its bold contract and lush, almost tactile surfaces.
Background
Mr. Wyeth was born in Wilmington, Delaware, United States, on July 6, 1946. His ancestor, Nicholas Wyeth, a stonemason, came to Massachusetts from England in 1645. Later ancestors were prominent participants in the French and Indian Wars, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the American Civil War, passing down rich oral histories and tradition to Wyeth and his family and providing subject matter for his art, which was deeply felt. His maternal ancestors came from Switzerland, and during his childhood, his mother was acquainted with literary giants Henry David Thoreau and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His literary appreciation and artistic talents appear to have come from her.
Jamie Wyeth is a third-generation member of the famed Wyeth family, who are celebrated as central figures in the revival of realism in American art. His father is Andrew Wyeth, painter of the American classic Christina’s World and his grandfather, Newell Convers Wyeth is acclaimed painter of vast landscapes and epic narratives of early Americana. Mr. Wyeth's mother, Betsy (James) Wyeth, encouraged his early inclination toward art. He has an older brother, Nicholas. During childhood, Wyeth had before him the example not only of his father and grandfather but also two of his aunts, Carolyn Wyeth and Henriette (Wyeth) Hurd, and his uncles Peter Hurd and John McCoy - all painters.
Education
Jamie Wyeth left public school after the sixth grade to be tutored at home so he could devote more time to art. Having acquired most of his own schooling from private tutors, his father didn't consider a formal education necessary for an artist. After taking English and history lessons in the morning, Mr. Wyeth would go to his aunt Carolyn's studio, where for the first year he was assigned to drawing spheres and cubes. Although bored by such disciplinary exercises, he understood their value.
Indifferent to sports and games and undistracted by the social activities that would have claimed his attention in school, Jamie Wyeth spent at least eight hours a day studying, sketching, and painting. His natural talent developed under the guidance of his father, who in his own youth had the benefit of N. C. Wyeth's instruction and encouragement. His father, he recalls, didn't actually give him lessons, but rather let him work and then offered constructive criticism.
Andrew Wyeth gave his son half the studio to work in. Jamie Wyeth recalls that his father was a feverish worker who loved to play classical music loudly while he worked. Jamie preferred - and still does - working alone and in silence. "The only problem is that the record player was in my part of the studio, so I’d stuff my ears with wax." Father and son painted together on many occasions, even modeling for each other.
Although their studio practices were different, they were similar in many ways. Both used media in a highly unorthodox manner. Similarly to his father, Jamie Wyeth often paints in mixed media - sometimes using watercolor, wash, and oil in a single painting. There was a period of time when he put his paintings into the oven because he wanted them to dry quickly, and when he wanted his paintings to dry slowly, he put oil of clove into the paint.
After a brief fling with egg tempera, Mr. Wyeth chose to work mainly in oils, allowing him a broader and brighter palette than his father’s and bringing him into a direct line with his grandfather N.C. Wyeth, whose love of color and texture was legendary.
He holds many honorary degrees including from Elizabethtown College (1975), Dickinson School of Law (1983), and Pine Manor College (1987).
By the time Jamie Wyeth was 18, his paintings hung in the permanent collections of the Wilmington Society of Art in Wilmington, Delaware, and in the William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum in Rockland, Maine - as well as in several private collections. He'd begun to paint portraits in oils, including works that still stand among his most powerful, such as Draft Age and Shorty. Wyeth examined all aspects of the appearance and character of the people he painted. For his portrait of Lincoln Kirstein, he required 200 hours of sittings by the impresario. True to his thoroughgoing approach, Wyeth studied anatomy one winter in New York by working every Saturday at a Harlem hospital morgue.
But if he had the advantage of a celebrated family name, Jamie Wyeth also faced the immediate rejection of his work by some of the avant-garde critics who dictated the criteria for the New York art scene. Some lost no time in transferring their distaste for the traditional style and themes of Andrew Wyeth's realistic canvases to the paintings of his son.
Toward the end of the 1960s, Wyeth took part in Eyewitness to Space, jointly sponsored by the NASA and the National Gallery of Art in Washington - a program designed to record details of the United States space probes. As a participating artist, he covered both launchings and splashdowns. From 1966-1971 Jamie Wyeth served in the Delaware Air National Guard, and also bought his parents’ lighthouse home, Tenants Harbor Light, in southern Maine, which provided him solitude, and the subject matter that he enjoyed most. While serving in the Delaware Air National Guard Mr. Wyeth was commissioned to paint a portrait of Charles L. Terry, Delaware's governor, although he rarely accepts commissions for portraits. He was also persuaded by people close to the Kennedys to undertake a posthumous portrait of President John F. Kennedy. He familiarized himself with Kennedy's appearance through photographs, motion picture footage, and talks with people who knew him, including several discussions at Hyannisport, Massachusetts, with the President's widow. To get a sense of the living President, he made numerous sketches of his brothers, Robert and Edward Kennedy.
During that period, he also 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 10 by 30 feet (3.0 by 9.1 m). In general, his primary subjects in the 1970s and 1980s were the people, animals, and landscapes of his Pennsylvania home and of Monhegan island in Maine.
Another historic event that provided subjects for his drawings was Watergate: on trips to Washington from Maine in the spring, summer, and fall of 1974, he sketched incidents in the Senate and Supreme Court relating to Watergate developments, as well as the tense courtroom scenes in Judge John J. Sirica's trial of John D. Erlichman and other defendants.
In 1971 he designed eight-cent Christmas stamp, the official White House Christmas cards for 1981 and 1984, and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver portrait for use on the 1995 Special Olympics World Summer Games Commemorative coin. He also lent his support to lighthouse preservation efforts in Maine in 1995 with his exhibition, "Island Light". Besides, Mr. Wyeth has illustrated three children's books, The Stray (1979), written by his mother Betsy James Wyeth, Cabbages and Kings (1997), written by Elizabeth Seabrook, and Sammy in the Sky (2011) by Maine author Barbara Walsh.
Jamie Wyeth has also produced detailed miniature dioramas (called tableaux vivants), including two 2013 works: one portrays Andy Warhol dining with friends at The Factory, and another depicts Lincoln Kirstein and other friends dining at a New York restaurant. These works were exhibited in a 2014 retrospective show.
Quotations:
"There's a quality of life in Maine which is this singular and unique. I think. It's absolutely a world onto itself."
"Being a painter is the only profession where you have to stand there with all your shortcomings on the wall."
"Animals are not cute. They are disturbing. Pigs do eat their young. Actually, I hate pigs. I just happen to have some who are friends of mine."
"I'm a very strange painter. I don't wake up one day and say, 'God, isn't this a fantastic day, I'd better get out and paint!' I think my father's more that way, because he's very fast."
"Painting is a field that attracts a lot of lazy people. You can just sort of sit and wait for things to come to you. I know a lot of painters who'll sit and chat it up all night. But God, I just can't do that."
"I paint every day. I really have no hobbies. That's all I do."
"The things that I paint are things that I know very well."
"I'm a very boring person, and all I do is want to paint and to record what I feel moves me or what interests me, and that can be in the form of a pig or in the form of President Kennedy."
"With a creature, there's no voice, so the eyes become the voice. When you get eye-to-eye contact, a real connection, it's limitless - and incredibly thrilling."
"Nothing is more uninteresting than completely knowing somebody, being totally at ease."
Membership
In 1972 Wyeth was appointed a council member of the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1975 he became a member of the board of governors of the National Space Institute. He is a member of the National Academy of Design and the American Watercolor Society.
National Endowment for the Arts
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United States
1972
National Space Institute
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United States
1975
Connections
In 1968, Wyeth married Phyllis Mills, daughter of Alice du Pont Mills and James P. Mills and one of his models. Although she had been permanently crippled in a car accident and used crutches (and later a motorized chair) to get around, Wyeth found her to be a strong, determined woman whose elusive nature meant that he continually discovered something new about her. Mills is the subject of many of his paintings (which usually depict her seated).