ROCKLAND — Jamie Wyeth glances at the paintings hanging on the gallery walls and sighs. "There's a lot of baggage in these things."

Grandson of North.C. and son of Andrew, Jamie Wyeth, who turned 73 on July half-dozen, has stood equally the inheritor of the Wyeth art legacy for a decade, since the decease of his father in 2009. With the death of his wife, Phyllis, this past January, he stands solitary autonomously from his art. In this time of personal loss and reflection, Wyeth is expressing the range of his emotions in a pair of summertime exhibitions at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland.

"Phyllis Mills Wyeth: A Commemoration" is what its title suggests: a celebration of a life. The paintings bridge more than than 50 years, from before they were married, and capture the couple's private moments: Phyllis asleep in her bed, riding horses and deliriously thrusting her face to the heaven every bit she catches falling pollen in her open rima oris, as if the pollen were falling snowfall. Glossed in an exuberance of spring green and xanthous, the painting radiates abundant joy and temptation.

The exhibition is every bit close as Wyeth is willing to become in any public display of grief, and is as honest an expression of beloved and loss that he could make. He declined a public reception for the exhibition, and wants the paintings to speak for themselves. Virtually come up from deeply personal places – the bedroom, the porch on their Monhegan home, looking seaward, and Christmas forenoon with the dogs. Wyeth portrays his wife with only a hint of the car accident that left her disabled at age 20, before they met.

Jamie Wyeth points at a item in his painting "Mr. Rockefeller on My Porch," which is role of his serial titled "Untoward Occurrences and Other Things." Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer

"I wasn't going to have some funeral or memorial service. Information technology's all such bull (expletive)," Wyeth scoffed. "Better to have this be a statement than some preacher up in that location saying 'Phyllis this' or 'Phyllis that.' … I had forgotten I painted her so many times from the very starting time, when I beginning met her. I ain all the work. A few of the paintings had been sold, and Phyllis started buying them back. Perhaps she anticipated this."

Wyeth's tribute to his wife plays out in museums forth the E Coast in 2019, with exhibitions in Maine, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. But the paintings of her – and other people from his life on brandish in a separate exhibit at the Farnsworth – tell as much or more than about him. Coming at this moment of vulnerability, the piece of work is strikingly personal and offers unusual insight into Wyeth'south journey as an artist and human being. It's the stuff of a future art history form syllabus, a written report of the last in a line of Wyeths whose paintings have influenced a century of American visual culture. Although Wyeth has relatives who pigment, he and Phyllis had no children.

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His mother, Betsy, is the other important woman on the walls at the Farnsworth, in the exhibition called "Untoward Occurrences and Other Things." The understated and resonant acrylic, oil and watercolor "My Mother and the Squall" is Wyeth'southward view of his female parent outside her Benner Island home off Port Clyde. As seen from a distance on the h2o, where whitecaps bounce as a storm builds overhead, the female parent appears equally a small figure at the front of the firm, in a dress of pink, opening the door and ducking inside as the storm hits.

It'southward a heroic image of a delicate adult female continuing strong confronting time and the elements, contained and with nobility – just every bit he portrays Phyllis, but with an entirely dissimilar perspective. Wyeth paints his wife intimately, from their individual moments looking out into the world. He paints his mother from a distance, from the exterior looking in.

His mother is in poor health, he said, and is no longer able to travel to her island domicile in Maine from her home in Pennsylvania. This will be the starting time summertime since she was a girl that she has non come to Maine. "She is 97 now, and information technology'southward really difficult to have her on the island. Information technology'southward a very sad move, but she is happy in Chadds Ford. And so …"

He leaves his sentence unfinished and moves on to talk about another painting.

The ghosts are everywhere in "Untoward Occurrences and Other Things." The exhibition is a drove of mostly new paintings and some deeply layered three-dimensional pieces. The paintings are based on Wyeth's half-century of experiences on Monhegan and lifetime on the Maine coast, and he offloads a lot of psychology and personal history in this body of piece of work.

With roots in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Massachusetts, 3 generations of Wyeths have painted in Maine. N.C. Wyeth became famous for his illustrations of books by Robert Louis Stevenson, but he was a fine-art painter at heart. He was captivated past the Maine coast during a visit in 1910 and a decade later purchased a home in Port Clyde, setting the family unit's stake firmly in the midcoast a solid century ago. Andrew Wyeth plant his inspiration on the islands and in nearby Cushing, where he made his best-known painting, "Christina's World," and where he is buried. Jamie Wyeth focused his attending on Monhegan and the islands.

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Wyeth generally stays on Monhegan in the wintertime and stays abroad – on the mainland or in Pennsylvania – during the spring and summer to avoid crowds and gawkers, but he has come off the isle for this interview at the beginning of the tourist flavour. His fingernails are caked with fresh bluish paint, and he's dressed for the studio, with mismatched socks and paint-flecked knickers. His pilus, a mix of brown and gray, is windblown and wild.

It was a skillful boat ride, he said.

In Maine, the Farnsworth is the center of the Wyeth universe. Across showing Wyeth paintings, the Farnsworth operates the Wyeth Middle, which generally focuses on the work of North.C. and Jamie, and a study center dedicated to Andrew. It offers tours of the Olson House in Cushing, where Andrew created "Christina's World," the iconic painting of a woman lying, torso twisted, in a field, looking uphill toward that same house. The museum opens the firm to visitors seasonally.

With their paintings in Maine and Pennsylvania, the Wyeths accept captured the public imagination for more than a century: North.C. seemingly most interested in the heroism and hope of early 20th-century America, Andrew focusing on the mysteries and personalities of people and identify, and Jamie pursuing his fascination with animals, eccentric people and wild, stormy environments.

In a confluence of generations, the fine art of all three is being considered and reconsidered by the American public. The Portland Museum of Fine art will open up a major North.C. Wyeth exhibition this fall, with a focus on both his illustrative work and fine-art pursuits, and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, volition open a new wing in September that will feature a big map of the earth that N.C. Wyeth painted in 1923, titled "Peace, Commerce and Prosperity."

Ten years afterward Andrew Wyeth died, critics and the public continue to reassess his paintings and reshape the narrative of his story, placing him and his artwork in the context of rural American life and its related psychology. Jamie Wyeth remains as productive as always, pursuing new ideas and experimenting with sculpture, media and themes. In his ain right, he's been in the public eye more than a one-half-century, when at historic period 20 he painted a portrait of the late John F. Kennedy. Equally recently as 2017, he had a high-contour exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

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Wyeth next to his painting of Andy Warhol, which is office of his series titled "Untoward Occurrences and Other Things" at the Farnsworth. Wyeth has two exhibitions of his work up at the museum, one of newer paintings and the other of paintings he did over the years of his belatedly married woman, Phyllis Mills Wyeth. Staff photograph by Brianna Soukup

Wyeth seems to take had fun making this electric current batch of Monhegan paintings. They testify his dark humor and are filled with energy. Chaos and commotion hover over much of this piece of work. He talks quickly as he moves around the gallery, excitedly pushing his face up close to the paintings to show a detail – and to critique his work. Looking at a painting he made of David Rockefeller seated at his porch on Monhegan, he'south not sure if he succeeded in building up the textural quality of the paint equally he had hoped to suggest the raging seas, simply he enjoyed trying. "I am a terrible technical painter, so I am always trying strange things," he said.

"Untoward Occurrences and Other Things" is an exhibition of heroes, more often than not, and characters. In addition to his female parent, Wyeth paints many of import people in his life and in island life. The roster of luminaries includes Monhegan shopkeeper, D-Mean solar day invader and German POW Henry Odom, in a ghostly pose that Wyeth made from memory; the image, from life, of David Rockefeller, then 97, on the porch of Wyeth's island home reading an e-book amid billowing winds; and the painter Rockwell Kent, whom Wyeth reveres and knew through an substitution of letters, and whose Monhegan paintings he collects and champions.

Wyeth's life is entwined with Kent'due south. In addition to collecting Kent'southward paintings, Wyeth as well owns one of two houses that Kent congenital on Monhegan, overlooking Lobster Cove. The structure, elementary but dramatic with its location close to the sea, shows up in both Wyeth shows this summer – and often in other artists' work. Maine painter Tom Hall is showing a silhouetted vision of the Kent-Wyeth house at Cove Street Arts in Portland.

Wyeth's painting at the Farnsworth shows Kent looking straight on in a red flannel shirt, easel in one hand, brush in the other. In the groundwork are the snowfall-covered cliffs of Monhegan and a nighttime figure plunging off the border, headfirst into the rocks and water beneath. It'south not fantasy or a dream, as Wyeth oft paints. He based the painting on the death of Emerge Moran in 1953, though her death occurred in the summer. She was living in Kent's home, and they were rumored to have had an thing.

On July one, 1953, the painter appeared earlier U.South. Sen. Joseph McCarthy's Senate subcommittee investigating communism. When Kent refused to say if he was a member of the Communist Party, the public soured on him. Just over a week afterwards, on July 9, Moran went missing. Her trunk was constitute floating in the body of water three weeks later. Kent was shunned on the island, and he never returned afterwards that summer.

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That'due south the macabre story Wyeth chose to tell of i of his painting heroes. It represents the low indicate of Kent'due south fourth dimension in Maine – and that nighttime sense of humor. There's no artist in the world whom Wyeth admires more than Kent, primarily because of the paintings Kent made on Monhegan during his early residency, from 1905 to 1910. Wyeth cares much less nigh the Monhegan paintings Kent fabricated subsequently in his career, around the fourth dimension of Moran'southward decease.

"He'south the one who brought me to Monhegan," said Wyeth, who has pledged his drove of Kent paintings to the Monhegan Museum, which volition share them with the Portland Museum of Art. "To me, he's the only painter who has ever worked out there. He did things out there that are simply boggling. The fact that he came to Monhegan every bit a young human being, and he wrote how he couldn't sleep at nighttime he was so excited about the island and painting then along."

It's odd that Kent was turned out on the island after being associated every bit a Communist, Wyeth said, considering it was on Monhegan where Kent became interested in the common skilful of the community. Kent was one of the few artists who lived at that place year-round. "He wrote a letter to two women that he knew on the island and said, 'How can I paint the fishermen if I don't fish? How can I paint the houses if I don't build them?' And it was this sort of social consciousness that I remember took over."

Well-nigh of Kent's best paintings are in Russia, Wyeth said. Many years agone, Wyeth explored the possibility of bringing Kent'south paintings back to the Usa, and he took his instance to the top of what was and then the Soviet Spousal relationship. "At one indicate, my begetter and I met with (Soviet leader Mikhail) Gorbachev, if you can believe it, in Washington to talk almost simply that. His point was, he wanted (the piece of work of) Russian painters to come to America. Why would he want an American painter to come back to America? There has been lots of talk, just they're somewhat reluctant. Who knows?"

The other looming presence is the popular artist Andy Warhol. Wyeth knew Warhol for 10 to 15 years in New York, and Warhol gave Wyeth studio space in The Factory, Warhol's studio that housed a collective of rotating artists. In this exhibition, Wyeth portrays Warhol larger than life as a painted figure emerging from backside a screen door, which is open into the gallery. Warhol is holding his dog, and the door is painted with stars and stripes.

During this interview, Wyeth offered to step within the roped-off area of the Warhol piece to pose for a photograph, then quickly apologized when a visitor turned up, and stepped out with an embarrassed laugh.

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It's called "First in the Screen Door Sequence." He made another of his father peering through a dormer window, with his hand reaching through cleaved glass. He fabricated a bandage of his father's manus for the piece. He made some other of the actor Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird." He painted Peck backside the door with the character Scout.

That slice, he said, is endemic by Walmart heiress Alice Walton, who has promised it to the museum she founded, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Fine art. "She keeps it in her house," Wyeth said. "She says she wants Picket and Atticus in her living room."

Wyeth knew Peck, who died in 2003. "He collected my work and whatnot. Whenever we would meet, I asked him about that film and working on it. Information technology was an extraordinary role."

He'southward working on some other in the screen door series of his granddad. In improver to Kent, Wyeth too is a large champion of his grandfather'due south piece of work, just says he can't compete with the big-money buyers in the art market. "I'thousand always butting heads with Steven Spielberg and, my God, the producer – what the hell is his proper noun, who did 'Star Wars?' "

George Lucas?

"Yep, George Lucas. If at that place is an N.C. Wyeth, they'll pay anything."

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And if there is an overarching theme to these paintings beyond love, loss and the ghosts of by, present and future, information technology is the hope that follows a tempest. Wyeth fills his surfaces with the yellows, oranges and reds of a Monhegan sky. A closing image is what he calls "Self-Portrait – Eighth in a Suite of Untoward Occurrences on Monhegan Island." Wyeth fabricated the painting in 2016, when Phyllis was declining.

He paints a respected isle inhabitant, a feisty gull, standing guard equally he sits on a rock and gazes into a glowing ruby sky that offers only the hope of tomorrow.

Paintings past artist Jamie Wyeth of his belatedly married woman, Phyllis Mills Wyeth, at the Farnsworth Brianna Soukup/Staff Lensman

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