Danger - Keep Away
33.5 x 41.5 in (85.1 x 105.4 cm) including frame
Along with the Brandywine Valley of Pennsylvania, the mid-coast region of Maine has remained central to the Wyeth family's artistic identity. Jamie Wyeth first arrived on Monhegan Island in the late 1960s, later acquiring Rockwell Kent’s former home and studio, and eventually purchasing the light station and keeper's buildings across the harbor on Manana Island. Unpopulated, windswept, and exposed directly to the North Atlantic, Manana provided an austere counterpoint to the busy seasonal artist colony on Monhegan. While generations of New England landscape painters gravitated toward picturesque marine subjects—quaint fishing dories, scenic harbors, and dramatic surf breaking on headlands—Wyeth deliberately avoided regionalist nostalgia. His focus on Manana turned instead to the stark, utilitarian realities of maritime survival, confronting the underlying isolation and vulnerability inherent to offshore life.
Executed in 1977, Danger Keep Away depicts the United States Coast Guard fog signal station on Manana Island, an outpost established in the nineteenth century to guide vessels through treacherous Gulf of Maine fog banks into Monhegan Harbor. Rather than presenting a broad maritime view, Wyeth tightly frames the station's warning infrastructure: the vivid orange steel framework of the radio beacon tower straddling a brick equipment shed, enclosed within a white picket enclosure marked with an explicit caution sign. The work relates closely to other pivotal Manana compositions of the mid-1970s, including Fog Bell (1974), in which navigational signals and alarms are isolated as psychological talismans against natural disaster. By shifting emphasis from the ocean itself to the manufactured systems designed to repel it, Wyeth departs sharply from contemporaries who romanticized island life, treating the coastal setting as a psychological space defined by perpetual caution and vigilance.
The composition relies on severe geometric structure and sharp shifts in light to reinforce this unease. Low, late-day sunlight rakes across the headland, throwing elongated shadows from the fence pickets across the foreground turf. The brilliant white barrier and orange tower cut an abrupt silhouette against the darkened water and the muted wall of fog moving in from the horizon. Utilizing drybrush and controlled watercolour washes, Wyeth captures both the tactile surfaces of wood, brick, and steel, and the heavy atmospheric dampness characteristic of the outer islands, balancing precision draughtsmanship with a quiet sense of foreboding. In uniting industrial utility, psychological restraint, and the stark geography of Manana Island, Danger Keep Away exemplifies Wyeth’s singular ability to transform an everyday maritime outpost into an enduring monument to human resilience against an indifferent sea.
Jaime Wyeth
James Browning Wyeth was born on July 6, 1946, in Wilmington, Delaware, and was raised in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. In 1966, he enlisted in the Delaware Air National Guard, serving until 1971. During this period, he received a commission from the Eyewitness to Space program run jointly by NASA and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to record launch activities at Cape Kennedy. In 1967, he completed an official posthumous portrait of President John F. Kennedy, commissioned by the Kennedy family.
In 1968, Wyeth married Phyllis Mills, an equestrian and disability advocate. During the early 1970s, he split his time between Pennsylvania and New York City, working alongside Andy Warhol at The Factory to complete a mutual series of painted portraits and sketches. In 1972, he was appointed to the board of directors of the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, and in 1975, he was appointed by President Gerald Ford to the board of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1976.
Wyeth participated as an official artist during the 1976 United States Senate Watergate hearings, producing courtroom drawings for regional and national press distribution. In 1987, he traveled to the Soviet Union as part of an official cultural exchange sponsored by the United States Information Agency, accompanying a touring exhibition alongside Soviet artist Tonya Shirokova. His paintings have been acquired into the permanent collections of major public institutions, including the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
More work by Jaime Wyeth
