Jamie Wyeth and the Unflinching Eye
 
 
The Wyeth name is widely known. And while Jamie Wyeth has given a lot of interviews in his time, Jamie Wyeth and the Unflinching Eye is 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 Eye answers those questions by placing Jamie Wyeth in his own artistic heritage as well as in the wider field of American art.