Page 23 - The Hunt - Spring 2024

Somewhere just below the surface of the natural world lies the supernatural—Amanda Burdan sees it in the work of Jamie Wyeth. The senior curator at Brandywine Museum of Art, Burdan is heading up Wyeth’s potent new show, Unsettled, which opens March 16 and runs through
June 9 at the museum. The exhibition traces the persistent string of intriguing, often disconcerting imagery over Wyeth’s career.
“The show’s name was mine,” says Burdan. “It wasn’t as if he had a weird phase in the early ’60s or ’70s, and that’s where it all is. His work has been a little bit strange throughout his career. There’s a short drive between obsession and unsettling—when you realize something has become obsessive. There’s maybe some psychology to that.”
It’s what compelled Burdan to ponder some darker backstory to
the celebrated artist’s work. “To me, it parallels things that go on in American popular culture—like Stephen King novels, the popularity of Stranger Things, horror movies, police procedurals and forensic shows— that strangeness that looking at a Jamie Wyeth painting can give you,” she says. “The feeling that you’re being surveilled.”
Without a doubt, Wyeth’s work is quite different from that of his father, Andrew, and grandfather, N.C. “His masterful use of combined media, the vigorous gestures of his brush textures, and an almost acidic color palette clearly distinguish his work from that of his notable forebearers,” says Thomas Padon, the Brandywine Museum of Art’s James H. Duff director.
Wyeth prefers to paint in solitude at his studios in Maine and Chadds Ford. His parents purchased Southern Island, at the mouth of Tenants Harbor, in 1978, and Wyeth also owns Rockwell Kent’s former cottage on Monhegan Island. His Brandywine Valley property is tucked away on its own sort of island—an isolated farm at the end of a long driveway. “When I was young, I always wanted to live on a boat—and an island is sort of a boat,” Wyeth says. “Islands intrigue me. You can see the perimeters of your world. It’s a microcosm.”
Greenville’s Somerville Manning Gallery is mounting is own the exhibition on the painter. Jamie Wyeth: Mysterious Familiar runs April 5 to June 1. “Jamie spends a lot of time out on Monhegan,” says gallery owner Vickie Manning. “He can paint. He’s alone. It’s wild. It’s crazy.
Highlights from the new exhibit Unsettled (from left): “Bones of a Whale,” “Sheep Eyes,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dusk” and “Berg.”
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ARTWORK COURTESY OF BRANDYWINE MUSEUM OF ART