Wyeth, Carolyn - 3/1/1994

Carolyn Wyeth, 84, an intense and independent painter from the artistic Wyeth clan, died yesterday in Chadds Ford.

Despite her background, Miss Wyeth never believed she was an artist until she was in her 50s and had been working at her craft for 40 years.

For years she didn't even sign her work, she once said, "because I didn't give a damn about selling them. Put them against the wall and maybe never looked at them for years. I paint because it gives me a kick inside. It lets me explode the way I feel toward things."

The daughter of artist N.C. Wyeth and his wife, Carolyn, and the brother of Andrew, Miss Wyeth has been called one of the "strongest female artists in America today."

"Carolyn Wyeth was a very strong individual with a very strong personality, and her paintings certainly reflect that," said James H. Duff, longtime director of the Brandywine River Museum. "She did not produce very many paintings, but she produced very powerful paintings."

Family members were unavailable for comment yesterday. Duff said their reaction to Miss Wyeth's death reflected their closeness.

"I just talked to Andrew Wyeth about 45 minutes ago, and he said he felt like part of him died today," Duff said last night.

Miss Wyeth left school when she was 12 to study painting with her father, and she continued to do so for 19 years. Yet until 1979, when she was 69 and the Brandywine River Museum had a retrospective of her work, Miss Wyeth had only two small shows.

In an interview before that exhibit opened, Miss Wyeth said that the realization she was an artist came to her in a flash as she was walking with some students from her studio to her home in Chadds Ford: "My God, I'm an artist."

Before, she said, she had thought of herself as a woman who painted, taught and cared for her mother. She painted just for herself.

She was secretive, like the rest of the family, living an almost reclusive life with her dogs - as many as four of them at once - in the brick house her father built on Rocky Hill in Chadds Ford.

But she considered herself unlike the others - except for her mother and Andrew - and was never afraid to speak her mind with a ready laugh and booming voice, the blunt words coming in clouds of cigarette smoke.

The family was embarrassed by her, she said. "If I didn't have a bad heart, I'd still be wild as hell," she told Richard Meryman, who wrote the catalogue to her 1979 show. "They're ashamed of me. Why the hell don't they accept me the way I am."

She was an earthy woman with a round face, a halo of black hair and an incendiary vocabulary. Meryman called her "the embodiment of the out-of- control streak in the Wyeth heritage, the wild side suppressed to a greater or lesser degree in her brothers and sisters."

Her oil paintings did not exhibit that streak. She painted scenes from her living-room window, done in different seasons and varying lights. She painted the nut trees beyond a porch and the spot that had been the favorite resting place for one of her beloved dogs.

Her intense personal vision, and the strength with which she depicted these subjects, led her to paint with what her brother Andrew called "a raw power seldom seen in contemporary painting."

"What inspires me in my painting is this whole damn place here - every tree, every rock, the fields, the hills, the studio, the smell of the place, everything I just love," she told Meryman, whose biographical sketch of her appeared in the New York Times Magazine.

She didn't paint human figures. "People don't appeal to me. I like animals," she once said. But she painted people's things - Pa's Hat, for instance, or her mother's pillow.

Miss Wyeth was married for a few years, "but that's no good for a woman artist. I need that aloneness. Anyway, I'm too damn independent to be married," she said, without naming her husband or saying what happened to the marriage. She did say her father did not approve of the union.

She was not domestic. She loved the outdoors and animals. She recalled her husband once said that she " 'put her damn dogs first, even before your art,' which is probably true. People don't mean very much to me." (She loved dogs because "they don't demand and they let you alone. But they love you.")

In her childhood, she grew a large vegetable garden and had a chicken house, built by her father. She kept chickens, white rabbits and jack rabbits and, for a time, a pet opossum.

That set her apart. While the rest of the Wyeth family was neat and tidy, ''I practically lived with the chickens," she said.

Outwardly, her life was settled and predictable. She remained in the Chadds Ford house nearly all her life. After both parents died, she kept in place the bust of Beethoven, the furniture and all the knickknacks they had collected.

She did not want to be anywhere else. She didn't like traveling - "and I don't give a damn for other countries," she said.

At the time of her major retrospective in 1979, she rarely made public appearances and described herself as a "near recluse." Even then, however, she had eight private art students and a waiting list of 40 more.

She is survived by her brother, Andrew; sisters, Henriette Wyeth Hurd and Ann Wyeth McCoy, and several nephews and nieces. Her brother Nathaniel died in 1990.

Memorial services will be held at a later date. Interment will be private.

Instead of flowers, the family requests that contributions be made to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford.1

• 1. Philadelphia Inquirer, 3/2/1994