enlarge John Ewing/Staff Photographer

Jamie Wyeth says his father “was very honest with me about my work, and I with him. Because we had nothing to gain by trying to impress one another, or trying to compliment one another.”

enlarge John Ewing/Staff Photographer

Jamie Wyeth is interviewed at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. Wyeth is standing in front of his grandfather N.C. Wyeth’s painting “Dan’l Nason, Sailing Master, 1814.”

enlarge Courtesy of Adelson Galleries, New York

“Pride,” from “Jamie Wyeth – Seven Deadly Sins”

enlarge Courtesy of Adelson Galleries, New York

“Envy” is part of Jamie Wyeth’s gull series that will be on display at the Farnsworth Art Museum through Aug. 30.

enlarge Courtesy of Adelson Galleries, New York

"Greed," from “Jamie Wyeth – Seven Deadly Sins”

enlarge Courtesy of Adelson Galleries, New York

"Anger," from “Jamie Wyeth – Seven Deadly Sins,” opening May 16 at the Farnsworth Art Museum.

enlarge Associated Press file photo

Jamie Wyeth and his father, Andrew Wyeth, after receiving the Avatar Award for Artistic Excellence from the Arts and Business Council of Greater Philadelphia in 2004.

Learn More

Jamie Wyeth: The Seven Deadly Sins, an upcoming exhibition at the Farnsworth Art Museum

Obituary of Andrew Wyeth, published Jan. 17, 2009

Three generations of Wyeth art at the Brandywine Museum: A short history.

IF YOU GO

WHAT: "Jamie Wyeth – Seven Deadly Sins"

WHEN: Opens May 16 and runs through Aug. 30

WHERE: Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, 16 Museum St., Rockland

MUSEUM HOURS: Through Memorial Day, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday; after Memorial Day, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, with extended hours until 8 p.m. Wednesday

ADMISSION: $12 adults; $10 seniors and students age 17 and older; free for members, children age 16 and younger and Rockland residents

CONTACT: 596-6457; www.farnsworthmuseum.org

ALSO OF NOTE: Three generations of Wyeths will show at the Farnsworth this summer: "A Tribute to Andrew Wyeth" opens May 23 and runs through Oct. 18, and "N.C. Wyeth – Painter and Illustrator" opens May 16 and runs through Nov. 15.

ROCKLAND — Jamie Wyeth has an eye on the weather.

Rain batters the windows of his office at the Wyeth Research Center on the Farnsworth Art Museum campus, whipped by an early-spring storm.

The torrent concerns Wyeth, because he's due at Tenants Harbor within the hour, and then must cross in his double-ended peapod to his island home a mile offshore.

There will be no one there to meet him, no captain to ferry him across the choppy seas to the safety of his island refuge. It will be Wyeth alone making this wet and windy passage, rowing against the elements and the onset of darkness.

There's no glamour in island life, he says, dismissing the romantic notion with a wave of his hand – and a hearty laugh. Inconvenience is the necessary cost of isolation, he says.

"Living on an island gives you a sort of focus," he says. "In the world we all live in today, there is so much we are bombarded with and so forth. I find to physically remove myself seems to work. Because I want to see every movie, I want to go to every concert. To work, you've got to stop that."

Less than four months since the death his father, iconic painter Andrew Wyeth, Jamie Wyeth, 62, stands alone as the last of three generations of an artistic dynasty. He is now the elder statesman of the first family of American art, with a legacy dating to the early 20th century and the work of his grandfather, illustrator N.C. Wyeth.

That, too, is a notion he chooses not to dwell on.

"Oh, God," he says, dreading the subject. "Those sort of considerations really don't enter much in my mind. I think it's interesting for people. It makes a certain accessibility for people to sort of latch onto that – now I am the last one left standing, or something.

"But no. All those considerations stay outside my studio. It really doesn't involve me. If it did, I would be frozen."

'A VERY PECULIAR PAINTER'

These days, Wyeth is anything but frozen.

He is full of energy and inspiration, busy at work in his island studio and, when he must, on the mainland. When not in Maine, he spends time at his farm in Pennsylvania. But mostly, and in all seasons, he chooses to be on his island, and almost always alone.

In the time since his father's death, Wyeth has thrown himself headfirst into his work.

On May 16, he opens an exhibition at the Farnsworth's Wyeth Center called "Jamie Wyeth – Seven Deadly Sins," in which he uses the common gull as a metaphor to explore the sins of envy, anger, gluttony, sloth, lust, greed and pride.

It's a subject that artists have toiled with for centuries, and something Wyeth himself has contemplated for at least four decades since fixating on a series of paintings by Paul Cadmus in the hallway of the Manhattan home of Wyeth mentor Lincoln Kirstein.

Cadmus' paintings impressed Wyeth in a horrifying way, and he's been thinking of them off and on ever since.

The gulls presented themselves as a metaphor for the work, because Wyeth lives with them on a daily basis. For many years, he has obsessed over the birds. He detests that so many painters depict gulls as beautiful white doves, "when in fact they are vicious scavengers, and they're edgy."

"And to me, they represent the sea, the ocean. Rather than me doing big surf paintings and so forth, I think the eye of the sea gull says more about the sea than a big, sudsy surf scene."

His concerns about the weather aside, Wyeth seems completely at ease as he talks about his work, his life and the passing of his father. He comes across as robust and vigorous, and is dressed the part of an islander, only this is no costume: a wool overcoat, a weathered shirt with one red button and a pair of knickers, with rubber thigh boots to keep him dry. His hair is windblown, his face ruddy.

He is a willing conversationalist, with few subjects off limits. He speaks...