{"id":63857,"date":"2022-09-01T15:35:25","date_gmt":"2022-09-01T19:35:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.themainemag.com\/?p=63857"},"modified":"2022-09-01T15:35:37","modified_gmt":"2022-09-01T19:35:37","slug":"a-wyeth-muse-30-years-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themainemag.com\/a-wyeth-muse-30-years-later\/","title":{"rendered":"A Wyeth Muse, 30 Years Later"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A Wyeth Muse, 30 Years Later<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Back on Monhegan for his yearly visit, Orca Bates Melenbacker reflects on becoming one of Jamie Wyeth’s favorite subjects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Anna Fiorentino
Photography by Matt Cosby<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Issue: September 2022<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Twelve miles out to sea from either Port Clyde or Boothbay Harbor in the lobster fisher\u2019s paradise and artist colony of Monhegan Island, cast away from almost everything, even the houses have big personalities. They hold stories of generations, some that are still being written.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Up a dusty narrow road, a bright blue door pops out from an old white cottage, the only house around, and upon walking up I realize I\u2019m entering a gallery once owned by Thomas Edison\u2019s son Theodore and his wife Ann, a painter. From low on a studio shelf, tucked away from the mosaics and the stately sculptures cast in bronze, I pick up a tiny, well-loved flip book with curling corners and rough illustrations of playful little goats. It\u2019s a family relic brought over from Monhegan\u2019s mostly uninhabited little sister, Manana Island, where the owner of Edison Studio, artist Daphne Pulsifer, has lived for decades with her husband, Danny Bates, in what\u2019s got to be the most peculiar and fascinating house of them all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Its dizzying octagonal roof is an enigma to newcomers waiting for the ferry workers to tie up to the dock. Tourists have wondered about this whimsical house at the center of Danny Bates\u2019s herd of goats, which are not only illustrated in the book but still grazing Manana\u2019s rugged green hills and steep rocky outcroppings. Practically every year, Monhegan\u2019s 59 year-round residents and the summer swell have watched Danny paddling back and forth in the harbor, hammering away, and adding new angles to the home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A view from Lighthouse Hill of Orca\u2019s family home, the only house on Manana Island.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Only two families are known to have lived on Manana, and the fairytale story of its oddball house begins with a hermit, Ray Phillips, whose obituary landed on the front page of the New York Times <\/em>in 1975. Phillips had built Manana\u2019s first home, the original driftwood shack, and as hermit life goes, he mostly kept to himself until eventually islanders watched the kerosene lantern burn out in his window. With the hermit gone and his shack beyond repair, his friend Danny began building a house near the same spot, raising one round of kids there, and then another after he married Pulsifer. To me and anyone who\u2019s been to Monhegan\u2019s Fish Beach or Lighthouse Hill, Danny\u2019s goats and some sheep look like specks of dust; to this family they\u2019re practically pets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same day when I walk into the Edison studio, I also meet one of the kids who grew up in the house: Danny\u2019s son\u2014 Pulsifer\u2019s stepson\u2014Orca Bates Melenbacker, now 46. Orca is on his annual visit to the island from his home in Pine Island, New York, and he and I strike up a conversation about life on Monhegan 30 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the name Orca Bates sounds familiar, maybe you\u2019ve seen his portrait hanging in museums and national galleries. Orca Bates was once the favorite child subject of Jamie Wyeth, Maine\u2019s most famous living artist, who still summers on Monhegan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Orca Bates Melenbacker back on the island where he grew up.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Orca and his boys.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Orca points to the spot on the dirt road by the woods where Wyeth first approached him in 1988 about posing for a painting. He was 13 at the time. Orca agreed, and the next day he went to Wyeth\u2019s house on Lobster Cove, where he asked Orca to put on a paint-splotched Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt (a gift to Wyeth from Arnold Schwarzenegger) and handed him a taxidermy seagull. Wyeth stayed through the winter just to finish that first oil painting of Orca, which he had him sign a year later when it was complete. Portrait of Orca Bates<\/em>, a work in contemporary realist style depicting an island boy clutching a seagull, hangs in the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEverything on the island belongs to someone, unofficially\u2014even the seagulls.\u201d I remember my neighbor telling me this when I stayed on Monhegan a few years ago. A seagull had turned up outside the door of my rental house with a broken wing. I understood what she meant\u2014that the people of Monhegan consider themselves stewards of their beautiful rolling land ending at the tallest cliffs on the East Coast. It filled the canvases of Jamie Wyeth\u2019s famous father, Andrew Wyeth, a watercolor painter; his grandfather, the illustrator N.C. Wyeth; and every artist from George Barrows to Edward Hopper. Theodore Edison took the responsibility seriously in 1954 when he bought 350 undeveloped acres to form the first land trust in Maine. But seagulls will do what they want, and it was the freedom of Monhegan\u2019s seagulls that inspired Wyeth to approach Orca in the first place. He called him \u201cmore of a seagull than a person.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Even the houses on Monhegan have big personalities.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Monhegan Island, an artist colony 12 miles off the coast of Maine, has long attracted painters from all over the world.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy friends and I were terrifyingly unsupervised growing up on Monhegan, climbing cliffs on the backside of the island,\u201d says Orca. As a teen, he was always getting into trouble. Back then the island was a different place with fewer rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou just sort of knew everybody. My dad and mom knew Jamie\u2014 that whole generation grew up together. They went to the same parties,\u201d says Orca, whose great-grandmother had started summering on Monhegan, followed by his grandmother and an aunt. Danny Bates and his stepmom were the first of the family to live there year-round. \u201cIt was a wild place back then,\u201d says Orca. In many ways, it still is: there\u2019s still no real law enforcement or healthcare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With limited electricity and only a boat or two a day going out in winter (if you\u2019re lucky) there wasn\u2019t much for a kid like Orca to do but haul traps from a skiff\u2014Monhegan is the only spot in New England that requires year-round residency to qualify for a lobster license\u2014run around Manana with the goats, and party with the island kids in a shack next to the pizza joint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Orca on the steel hull of a wrecked tug near Jamie Wyeth\u2019s \u201cKent House\u201d and studio.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When the summer islanders went home and Orca was left with the few remaining kids in a one-room schoolhouse, he was happy to sit for Wyeth, sometimes for four or more hours a day. Wyeth paid well\u2014better than mowing lawns\u2014and the days turned into months, then years. As he grew up, he became the subject of many paintings, and Wyeth\u2019s muse and friend. The two would talk for hours, taking breaks to fire guns off the porch into the Atlantic\u2014\u201cright over there,\u201d Orca points to Wyeth\u2019s \u201cKent House,\u201d depicted in the 1971 painting. The gray shingled cottage was built on the southern tip of the island in 1906 by the landscape painter Rockwell Kent for his mother. Wyeth purchased it in 1967 at age 21 with the money from his first public exhibition, and there he began to paint what he called \u201cthe less-celebrated aspects of island life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next to me on a rocky hill, gazing out at the waves from under swooping gulls, Orca went back in time. \u201cI spent a lot of hours with Jamie over those years. I remember there wasn\u2019t much of a break between paintings, maybe a month or two, and then he\u2019d have another idea with a bunch of props, like his whale jaw still hanging on his living room wall,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Monhegan Museum, which holds historical photos of the island\u2019s beloved hermit.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When school started back up, Orca took the seaside path every day to the home of his new artist friend, where he got to watch screenings of prereleased action films on VHS, like Cobra <\/em>starring Sylvester Stallone, and Red Scorpion<\/em>. \u201cJamie had this wall of tapes sent from the directors that were worth like hundreds of dollars apiece,\u201d says Orca. His weathered off-in-the-distance gaze disappears behind a boyish smile, and I see Wyeth\u2019s fascination. Quiet. Reserved. Raw, and rough by now. Hard to reach, but you feel like you\u2019ve won the lottery when you finally get him talking. You see his depth. \u201cThat water is no joke. It\u2019s beautiful. It\u2019s powerful. It\u2019s cool looking. And it will kill you,\u201d says Orca, who lost a friend off the cliffs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Five years later, the painter had finished four works with Orca\u2019s name in the title, his signature on each painting, and numerous others in the permanent and temporary collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Delaware Museum of Art, Seattle\u2019s Frye Art Museum, and others. When Orca attended high school off the island at Gould Academy, Wyeth flew his helicopter in to hand Orca his finished portrait and hosted an art show for him and his classmates. And they still meet up on the island to catch up when Orca is in town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Years later, \u201cPortrait of Orca Bates\u201d is now on view at the Farnsworth Museum.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Orca Bates Melenbacker back on the island where he grew up.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cJamie and I were always buddies. He\u2019s definitely eccentric. He speaks his mind, no apologies, and is very to the point. He\u2019s just a good guy to hang around,\u201d says Orca, who was used to tripping over artists at their easels and inside their studios, starting with his mother, then Pulsifer, and later his sister and younger brother Cat, a Maine jeweler who also modeled for Wyeth once or twice (in \u201cCat Bates of Monhegan,\u201d 1995). It should be no surprise, then, that Orca\u2019s wife is an artist, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For many years Orca, who now owns a shipping container company called Box4Grow, hated coming back to the island: it felt small and \u201ceveryone was in your business.\u201d But eventually, he came back to the goats and to the only home on Manana, and to conversations with his old friend, Jamie Wyeth, inside his cottage by the sea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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