This book traces a persistent vein of intriguing, often disconcerting, imagery over the career of renowned artist Jamie Wyeth (b. 1946), famous for his hyperrealist paintings of farm animals and Maine lighthouses. The focus in this volume is on the chilling thread that runs through his work, present but not overwhelming, and ever-evolving with his style and subjects. Whether he is introducing curious characters or surveying strange landscapes, Wyeth is at home with uneasy subjects and a master of the unsettled mood.

Like his father, Andrew Wyeth, and grandfather N. C. Wyeth before him, Jamie Wyeth splits his time between the Brandywine River Valley of Pennsylvania and Delaware and the mid-coast of Maine. In these two locales Wyeth has passed through many "obsessions," as he calls his favored subjects: farm tools brimming with the potential for violence, eccentric portraits and unnerving figure studies, haunted places, and possessed plants and animals. In addition to the main essay, contributors explore the creation of similarly unsettling moods in film, dance, sound artistry, and classical music.