Do you have an iconic image of life on Nova Scotia’s South Shore?  Is it the mansion resort life of Chester or the magical spell of the old houses and churches along the shore in Mahone Bay?  Was it shaped by the experience of actually growing up here by the sea?  Or was it an inland vision derived from books and magazines?  Mine was an inland vision, having grown up in South Texas.  I was 13 upon my first encounter with the gray sandy coast, alternately slick with oil spills and red tide.  Mesmerized by the churning green surf pounding the aging piers, I knew I wanted to live by the water—just not this water.  In the early 1980’s, the now defunct magazine, M the civilized man, educated its reader on grouse hunting in Scotland, staying at an Adirondack camp, the legendary (still-living) Benny Goodman, and the work and life of American realist painter Jamie Wyeth.  Jamie Wyeth is the son of realist painter Andrew Wyeth (“Christina’s World”) and grandson of painter and illustrator N. C. Wyeth.  As a family, they are icons who have revealed through their art a seemingly idyllic world on the coast of Maine replete with fog-shrouded islands, stalwart old lighthouses, and quiet, still, technology-free homes.  One particular painting, “The Islander”, captured my enfeebled Texas imagination.  It was a ram on a cliff proudly surveying the misty edges of his Maine island home, "Manana".  The quiet serenity made me want to live there in that painting.  That image has stayed in my mind’s eye these past twenty years as I sought the painted idyllic life of Wyeth in New Zealand, the Pacific Northwest, Maine and finally Nova Scotia (I must say the cold kept me from coming here first!)

A few years after moving to Nova Scotia, we made our way down to the Delaware Art Museum and the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.  It was a visual feast of Wyeth family paintings and the indomitable Howard Pyle, teacher of N.C. Wyeth at the turn of the last century.  Again infatuated, I purchased an art book entitled Wondrous Strange, the Wyeth Tradition that traces the realist imagery link between Howard Pyle and the Wyeth family--“the incarnation of the fantastic in everyday reality”. 

We made our way back to Nova Scotia and eventually traveled to Canning in the Annapolis Valley.  There we encountered another artist enchanted with the Wyeth tradition.  His name was Alan Bateman, son of the Canadian artist Robert Bateman.  Alan was working on a painting of a gas lantern hanging in a woodwork-filled hallway.  The quiet intensity again revealed the awe in the everyday.  And again, it made me want to live there.  Then I realized I was already there, living in a place made fantastic through this artist’s eye—this artist’s Nova Scotia.  Just to the side of Alan’s canvas was a book, Wondrous Strange (aha!).  

Eventually my wife and I created our own world in Nova Scotia far different than the painted visions.  But if you wonder what life would be like in one of those paintings, see “Betsy’s World” in the June 2003 “American Country Houses” issue of Architectural Digest.  As Jamie’s mother and Andrew’s wife, Betsy Wyeth enjoys the “simple” living of island life within iconic houses surrounded by iconic barns and fish houses.  Her mostly bare walls feature the window views of her islands and the occasional iconic Wyeth painting.  It is idyllic, but also purist and solitary.  If no longer a vision for my own home, it was a still an iconic ideal for my mind’s eye and a peaceful retreat from the noise of everyday life.  Last week I saw Allan Bateman’s finished lantern painting on the wall of a very modern home—another person’s peaceful retreat from today’s world?

I did finally meet Jamie Wyeth last year on a trip to the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine.  He was giving a private tour of his many portraits on Rudolph Nureyev.  I was captivated again.  Not so my children who wandered right by Jamie Wyeth and asked me why there were all of these paintings of Superman?  Hmmm…I guess the actor Tom Welling of television’s Smallville does resemble the young Nureyev.  Pass on the icons…