(Andrew Wyeth died quietly at his home in Chadds Ford, Penn. January 16, 2009)
Andrew Wyeth, along with his wife Betsy, were the very first founding members of the Island Institute. Their vision, which they never stopped supporting, respected the islands as traditional outposts of a self-sufficient way of life, even as Maine’s islands began to be transformed into summer playgrounds. Their potent vision was encoded into the original DNA of the Island Institute.
Many of the ideas that shaped the early days of the Institute were hammered out on the anvil of Allen and Benner Islands where Andy and Betsy spent most of the last quarter of a century together. Andy’s view of islands, where the chaos of nature reined supreme, was always in dynamic tension with Betsy’s pastoral instincts to settle and tame island landscapes. It is a testament to their undying love that such titanically opposing views could be contained in the confines of their highly em-bounded island worlds.
Allen and Benner Islands off Port Clyde became places where Betsy cleared land, built homesteads and brought sheep to keep island meadows open. Island strands, in Andy’s watercolors, were places of chaotic beauty, where violent seas raked their shorelines and pirate lobstermen hauled each other’s traps under the cover of darkness. Betsy built island ponds that attracted migrant waterfowl, while Andy painted the opportunistic predators of island seabirds. Betsy cleared island forests to create spectacular views of an enclosed island world, while Andy disappeared into their dark interiors to find places where ravens hoarded secret stashes of shells amid luxuriant beds of ferns.
Andy loved the islands’ wildness, their separateness, their otherness. As an artist, he lived outside society, and Maine’s islands continuously lured him outward to their ravaged edges.
In Maine, his heart was always offshore. I like to think of him there now, fleeting through the restless rote.