If the Press Herald’s July 6 headline, “Art of Darkness,” about Jamie Wyeth’s “Unsettled” exhibition at Farnsworth Art Museum, was intended as a pun on Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” it was not an apt pun. Like Conrad’s novella, the theme of Megan Gray’s feature erroneously suggests pervasive savagery underscores Wyeth’s paintings.

While even the keenest critics cannot read the mind of Wyeth, I believe his artist’s eye transcends the fallacious assumption that “Unsettled” is intended to conjure fear and anxiety. Rather, I believe his paintings convey an aesthetic discernment of the perennial presence of paradox in the world. Paradox may conjure duality and existential tension, but it shouldn’t require surrender to fear and anxiety. If angst is what I’m supposed to feel when I see “Cat Bates of Mohegan” or “Buzz Saw,” I will not surrender.

Like Jamie Wyeth, as a playwright I try to portray the world and humanity as they are, exponents of the perennial presence of paradox. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have interpolated soft porn into my play “High Tide” about a 30-something fellow’s genuine vocational calling to the Anglican priesthood.

Without putting words in the mouth of Jamie Wyeth, what he does painterly in “Unsettled” is what I attempt literarily in “High Tide.” I write plays to reflect life, so that my audience – through compassion, humor, understanding and love – will gain insight into their own lives, the lives of others and (for people of faith) the Christ Consciousness.

Albert Black
Ogunquit