The Wyeth name is widely known. And while Jamie Wyeth has given a lot of interviews in his time, Jamie Wyeth and the Unflinching Eyeis the first film that fully reveals deep personal insights into his artistic thinking. It’s also the first film that establishes his place as a great American artist in his own right apart from his considerable family legacy.
The son of Andrew and grandson of N.C., Jamie is the last in line of artists that spans a century of narrative painting. He was nurtured in a world of painting and studios – amongst the gentle hills of the Brandywine Valley and the rocky coasts of Maine. He made a splash early with his first one-man exhibition at Knoedler Gallery in 1966 at the age of 20. As a young man in New York City, he was at the epicenter of art, fashion and high society, including an immersion into Andy Warhol’s Factory scene of the 1970s.
The film travels from the Wilmington, Delaware farm that Jamie shared with his wife and muse, Phyllis Mills Wyeth, to the Chadds Ford studios of his father and grandfather, to islands of Maine, where Jamie also finds inspiration for his work. Though many of his works depict the Maine coast, animals, and wildlife, Jamie Wyeth has also painted portraits of political and entertainment figures, including the likes of President John F. Kennedy, Rudolf Nureyev, Andy Warhol, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The filmmaking team had unprecedented access to the artist, his personal archives as well those of his distinguished artist family members. Jamie Wyeth and the Unflinching Eye is rich in archival footage that creates a sense of time and place. It is packed with sketches, drawings and paintings from the artist’s oeuvre, to illustrate the breadth and depth of his work to date. Layers of complexity in the art are revealed and celebrated by family members and some of the most preeminent scholars of American art.
Like his father, and his father before him, Jamie Wyeth’s early works show a clear individual talent. Our film asks “What does it mean to be born a Wyeth? How do you move forward as an artist to create your own voice with such a strong and beloved family lineage?” Jamie Wyeth and the Unflinching Eyeanswers those questions by placing Jamie Wyeth in his own artistic heritage as well as in the wider field of American art.
"You don't have to be passionate about painting to be captivated by this well-edited and heartfelt documentary, but it might inspire you to pick up a paintbrush or, at the very least, to seek out Jamie Wyeth's paintings at a museum." - NYC Movie Guru
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
I first met Jamie Wyeth when I interviewed him for a documentary film I was making about his father, Andrew Wyeth. A small film crew and I met Jamie in Chadds Ford, PA, on a brisk, cloudy autumn morning. “You picked a perfect day He hopped out of his vehicle, we popped on a microphone and he was off, walking quickly up the hill at Kuerner Farm (a location of some significance to his father’s work), talking all the way, enlightening us about his father’s methodology of immersing himself into the lives of the people he painted. Jamie’s a great storyteller. He was wildly animated and deeply passionate about his father’s work. It was a great interview, and in addition to learning more about Andrew, I wanted to know more about his son.
After a quick internet dive into Jamie’s life (which took me from Warhol’s Factory to Watergate, from NASA to Nureyev, from the hills of Chadds Ford to the islands of Maine), I began dreaming about a film about Jamie. And while different chapters of his life were available online, I became completely excited about a full-length work that would embrace the entire scope of his life, one that was rooted in his incredible lineage, but made new discoveries about his life path and work.
In addition to his farm where he and his late wife and muse Phyllis Mills Wyeth lived, and the islands of Maine where he also lives and works, many of the locations that are an important part of his life – specifically his childhood home and early studio, his father’s studio and his grandfather’s studio -- are beautifully maintained by the Brandywine Museum of Art. It’s like stepping into art history.
I hope that audiences will discover the depth and richness in an artist that they thought they knew. His works are all reflections of particular obsessions, an immersion into the lives of people and animals that have some deep meaning for him. For me, one of the delights of the film is seeing Jamie’s brushwork loosen up from the remarkable, but precise early portraits like “Shorty” and “Draft Age” to his most recent dream-like worlds of mystery and intrigue. All the while, his unflinching eye invites us to see the world the way he sees it.
