Long article on JW model Orca Bates
http://archive.yankeemagazine.com/article/portrait-orca-bates
A Portrait of Orca Bates
By Cindy Anderson | From the September 1996 issue of Yankee.
Who is the boy in the Monhegan paintings of Jamie Wyeth?
I thought I knew Orca Bates before I ever met him. During my summer stays on Monhegan Island, a whale-shaped bit of land ten miles off the Maine coast, I came to associate his name with the place as much as I did its granite cliffs and rich light. I looked at portraits of Orca by the painter Jamie Wyeth and saw more than the boy's sinewy beauty. "If Monhegan were a person, it would be Orca," his sister said once, and this seemed true. The paintings of Orca evoked the island itself moody and remote, a thing apart.
Wyeth intended it that way. "Orca is a true island child, innocent and wild at the same time," he told me. "I was fascinated by his life, by the face that comes out of living on an island. There was this androgynous quality. What was he — a boy, a girl, an animal, a fish? I had to paint him to find out."
The stories about Orca defined him further: How, as a toddler, he'd dipped his father's checkbook into honey and used it as a paint brush. How in kindergarten he'd escaped daily through a window in the island's one-room school. How last summer, when he was 19, he had lived alone on Manana, an uninhabited islet 150 yards from Monhegan. When I finally met Orca in a diner in Gainesville, Florida, where he attends college, he looked different from the boy of the painting — older, less exotic, dressed in torn jeans and a T-shirt. On his arm a tattoo of a scorpion was inscribed "Igweed." Even so, I expected him to confirm my earlier impressions. I thought: Orca is solitary and unruly. Interesting if not particularly likable.
Over a breakfast of waffles and grits, Orca wanted to talk first about his family on Monhegan. Had I met his half-brother, Cat? Yes, I told him. Rana and Willow? Yes. What about Mako? "He is so precious," Orca said. " I really, really miss them." There were sudden tears in his eyes. I was struck by this softness; it was unexpected. I asked about Florida, and he said the food was tasteless and the soil too thin. Instead he talked about the island: the smell of salt, the blue of the sea, and the sound of truck tires on gravel. "When you're on the water, the air is better," Orca said. "Down here, you have to take two breaths for every one you'd take at home."
He said he'd come to Florida in August, initially to live with his grandmother and look for work before school started — not so much to leave behind Monhegan as to be away for a while: ''I'm not ready to spend the rest of my life there yet. It's so small, and the cold kind of gets to me."
He poured cream into coffee, stirred, set down his spoon. The questions I'd prepared during the flight no longer seemed right: How does it feel that a century from now people will look at your face and body when they view Wyeth's pailltings? Do you feel frozen in time by an artist's brush?
I thought of Wyeth's comparison of Orca with a blank canvas. "He was anything I wanted him to be," Wyeth had told me. "I see a distinct islandness with islanders, a certain edge. Am I putting that into them? I don't care, as long as something comes out of it."
Orca waited a while when I asked about the paintings. "They were staged," he said finally. "You make a painting, then you make up a story to go with it. Jamie wanted a wild child, so that's who I became."
I said then that maybe I'd come to do a story about a myth. Orca bit into a triangle of toast. "I don't know," he said. "There's that, and there's something else. There's the real person."
To demythologize Orca Bates is to go back to the beginning, to Manana, the mysterious rocky islet where Orca spent the first four years of his life. For decades Manana had had a single inhabitant, Captain Ray Phillips, the so-called Hermit of Monhegan, who lived across the harbor on Manana in a shack he had constructed from Coast Guard crates and a dismembered sailboat. Phillips shared the islet with a fog horn and a glacial boulder reputed to contain Phoenician inscriptions.
After Phillips died in 1975, Daniel Bates, who was 23, took over the place with his 16-year-old girlfriend, Amy Melenbacker. The two had met the year before on Monhegan, where Daniel 's grandmother had a cottage and Amy summered with her family. They were lured by the romance of a life on Manana. But the house was a mess: Phillips's sheep had lived indoors with him, and Daniel and Amy had to scrape three inches of manure off the floor before they could move in. They subsisted by raising chickens, vegetables, and goats, whose milk was sold to Monhegan islanders under the trade name "Barbarian Cheeseworks."
Orca was born the following August. He was not an easy baby, colicky and wakeful, and was a strain on his young parents' child-rearing skills. He walked at eight months; by his first birthday he was scrambling over rocks as easily as the goats. "Orca was constantly in motion," said Amy. "He was always pushing the limit, testing us, testing himself."
To the boatloads of day-trippers who arrived daily on Monhegan from the mainland, Orca was the wild child of Manana. As the ferry docked, they crowded starboard for a glimpse of the tow-headed, sun-burnished toddler running naked over the ledge. More than one tourist showed up uninvited on Manana with a camera. "We welcomed the fog when it rolled in," said Daniel.
For his part, Orca took to celebrity easily. On Monhegan, where he went with Amy to deliver milk, he smilingly accepted the brownies day-trippers bought for him. By six he was earning money rowing visitors back and forth to Manana in his skiff; he charged $1 per trip. Jamie Wyeth was a frequent customer; he came to Manana with his easel, not to paint Orca but to try to capture the islet. "There was this primeval mood on Manana, a starkness, almost a monumental quality. It kept drawing me back," he said.
Wyeth would paint, and Orca would run through the sedge or play with turtles at the edge of a small pond. The artist and the child said little to each other, but each season that Wyeth returned, he was watching Orca grow, watching the boy absorb the physicality of his surroundings. Once, after Orca had landed his skiff and was walking up from the water, Wyeth saw him stop and stand silently. Wyeth walked to him. "Orca was looking down at his feet, scrutinizing a rock. 'I have never stood on this rock before, ' he told me. He was studying it the way you would study a piece of yourself, with the same kind of intimacy. To me he embodied the place."
By the time Orca was 12, his life was more complex. Amy and Daniel had divorced and both were remarried. Orca and his younger sister Kila split their time between two households on Monhegan — Shining Sails, where Amy and her husband had opened a guest house, and the Bates cottage, where Daniel lived with his new family. Orca was attending the island school and working part-time hauling brush and painting buoys. He had started smoking cigarettes, sometimes chewing pine needles to hide the smell, sometimes not. "I had an attitude," said Orca. "I thought I wanted my freedom . Now I think I was kind of confused."
His closest friend was Kole Lord. "I never met Orca, I just always knew him," Kole said. "We were more than best friends. We could think each other's thoughts. If we were walking down the road together, we would turn around at the same time and walk the other way." In spite of their closeness, Kole sensed Orca's isolation, described him as quiet and intense. "Orca learned that the world is a place where you have to look out for yourself. He was smart, cunning, I guess. He got that way partly from living on an island and partly from how he grew up."
Jamie Wyeth began painting Orca just before the boy turned 15, the same age Wyeth had been when he started coming to Monhegan some 25 years earlier. Although Wyeth 's family had a summer place onshore in Cushing, Wyeth preferred Monhegan for its solitude and its winds and for the presence of the open sea. "I love living on a place where you can see the perimeters of your world. It brings everything into focus," he said.
Wyeth also found himself drawn to the people of Monhegan, to a pattern of life reduced to basics. "Island life is intense," he said. "There's physical isolation but also an isolation from each other, a kind of alienation that comes from the environment." Wyeth sought to capture that islandness in his work. "Portraits are not noses and eyeballs. Nothing interests me less than the looks of someone. I want to get at who they are."
More than he wanted to paint anyone else, Wyeth wanted to paint Orca. Several days a week after school Orca would walk the dirt road to Wyeth's house overlooking Lobster Cove, on the boulder-strewn southwestern end of the island. The painter would be waiting, and he and Orca would blow off steam by firing cherry bombs and bottle rockets from the ledge in front of Wyeth's house — a handsome, cedar-shingled place of deep porches and wide windows. "When Orca was posing for me, there were a lot of noises on this end of the island," Wyeth said. Orca remembered it similarly: "The best part about posing was playing with Jamie's toys."
Inside the studio Wyeth would set up his paints, and Orca would don a costume and slick back his hair with oil. For the portrait that shows Orca cradling a sea gull, he posed with a decoy. "That was a heavy duck," he said. "I got a raise from $7 to $8 because of it." There was a VCR, and Orca often watched movies while he modeled, usually something with action — Rambo, maybe, or The Terminator.
Wyeth made four portraits of Orca in the first 18 months: all posed, in rich, earthy colors, and all with a similar set to the boy's face. In each, Orca's signature appears with Wyeth's — often more prominently than the artist's. "I wanted to recognize that a portrait takes two people," Wyeth said. Orca took the signing seriously, deliberating the color and laboring over where to sign before printing his name in rounded, usually red, letters. "No matter how hard I tried, I did a messy job. I found out that it's hard to sign your name in paint," said Orca.
Other than the signature, Wyeth thought Orca took little interest in the portraits; they rarely discussed them, and at the end of a session Orca almost never came around to Wyeth's side of the easel to see what he had done. But Orca said his apparent indifference was actually something else: Whenever he looked at the paintings, he saw himself distorted, so he stopped looking. He remembered the nude Wyeth painted of him in front of a whale jawbone: "Jamie made my feet huge in the portrait, twice the size they really are. I looked at those feet, then I checked out my own. They were so different. The image of me was always limited to how Jamie wanted to paint me." Orca said he grew jaded. "I got this attitude: OK, I can sit here and watch movies and make money. It was a job."
Even so, Orca basked in the attention that resulted from posing for Jamie Wyeth. As the portraits were sold, most for around $100,000, Orca began being recognized in public. He got fan mail, once from a girl who said she'd fallen in love with him. He cultivated his look, dressing and wearing his hair as he had in the paintings. "I tried to fit the wild-child image," he said. "I did things on purpose, to be as big as I could."
The following fall Orca left Monhegan to enter boarding school on scholarship. That winter Wyeth agreed to let his work appear in an exhibit at the school; many of the paintings featured Orca. "Almost nobody knew me at Gould, and then everybody did," said Orca. The same year Wyeth flew down by helicopter to fetch Orca for a modeling session. The helicopter landed in a field adjacent to the gym, where the freshmen were attending a dance workshop. Orca heard the whir of blades, put on his boots, and ran outside. His classmates watched from windows as Orca slid over the ice to greet Wyeth. "It was pretty cool, I remember thinking that," said Orca.
People close to Orca wondered about the impact of such celebrity. His father feared that modeling had skewed Orca's concept of himself. "At the age of 15, Orca decided that all he needed to do in life was pose for those paintings," said Daniel Bates. "He had a sense of accomplishment that wasn't his. In the end he was really just an object." But even Daniel was ambivalent. "Jamie did capture Orca. I look at the repose in Orca's face, and I have a certain sense of pride. I think, that's my son." And, Daniel said, Wyeth was sensitive to the effect posing could have on Orca. "Everything was done one step at a time," he said. "No one wanted Orca to be damaged."
Some saw inevitable difficulties. "Kids form their identities from the adults around them. The spotlight is on the adult, a little of this one and a little of that one," said Bill Payne, who owns a store on Monhegan. "But when the spotlight is on you, when you're an island kid who is the subject of a series of paintings by a famous artist, then it's tougher to figure out who you are."
Orca said he struggled with that sense of identity. Wyeth frequently invited him to parties at Lobster Cove, often for the unveiling of a painting. Guests would be milling about, and inevitably someone would ask Orca to stand next to the new portrait. "It was like posing all over again," said Orca. "They'd ooooh and aaah, but they weren't looking at me. They were looking through me."
On Monhegan Island Orca may be known as the boy who modeled for Jamie Wyeth, but one day last fall at a college outside Gainesville, he was all but anonymous. "Who I was on Monhegan doesn't mean anything to people down here," Orca said. "I'm in a totally different place now." The ride to school, along a slow river through pastures of sun-toughened grass, had made that clear. This part of Florida — inland and flat — seemed a long way from the wind-scoured cliffs of Monhegan Island.