Robert Indiana, the celebrated artist and Maine resident, is obsessed with love. His early career was launched into the mainstream by the creation of a painting that stacked the letters of the word “LOVE” in bold colors. The painting, which has transmogrified into sculpture, jewelry, posters and a United States postal stamp, has become one of the most recognizable icons of the 20th century.

The walls of Indiana’s home in the former Odd Fellows hall on Vinalhaven are covered with many of these variations of the “LOVE” piece. Indiana has also written love poems. If you ask him if he has been in love, he may squint his eyes puckishly and say: “Innumerable times. I’m very fond of the subject.”

Ask Indiana about Afghanistan, however, and the romance ends. That sparkle in his eye disappears and a curmudgeonly shroud slips over his demeanor. He lived in New York City for many years and was there the day of the terrorist attacks. He witnessed the streets in his old Bowery neighborhood morph in less than an hour from an art enclave to a debris-covered disaster zone. He is, in a word, angry.

“I have such strong feelings about what happened,” said Indiana, sitting in one of the large, museumlike rooms in his home. “I missed all the wars in this country. I was a shade too young for the second World War. It’s the fact that I lived eight years on Coenties Slip. I never liked the World Trade Center because it was distressingly tall and threw off the Manhattan skyline. I had no great feeling about the loss of the World Trade Center. It was the loss of the people. I felt Kabul and Afghanistan should be targeted.”

Here, Indiana is referring both to his own fierce patriotism and a new work he

is promoting these days. The painting depicts a map of Afghanistan at the center of a bull’s-eye. The words around the central circle read: “Just as in the anatomy of man every planet must have its hind part.” The painting evokes a protest series Indiana made in the 1960s. Unlike the civil rights-era series, however, “Afghanistan” is the antithesis of reconciliation efforts.

“I watched the World Trade Center go up in flames and then fall to the ground,” said Indiana, as he smoked a cigar and drank coffee from a mug with a pattern of the word “Bob” glazed onto it. “That anyone would have the effrontery to do what they did – we were all shocked. For artists, this is a beautiful opportunity to memorialize the situation. But I am not memorializing. I am making a statement about the people who had the audacity to kill that many Americans.”

“One of the things Bob does better than anyone else is riveting one’s attention to a particular moment, to an aspect of culture,” said Dan O’Leary, director of the Portland Museum of Art, which mounted a major retrospective of Indiana’s work a few years ago. “He has been doing that idiosyncratically since 1959. The Afghanistan piece falls into that awareness of a geopolitical situation. There are lots of situations where Bob has held his piece. He’s very private. But every now and then, he takes a position that can seem a little stark.”

Indiana hoped “Afghanistan” would be seen as a “patriotic gesture,” and then be publicly shown to inspire some, inflame others, but ultimately to help the country win the war. Since the most violent phase of the war in that country seems to be ending, however, the painting has become more commentary and less propaganda for the war effort.

So far, the art establishments of Maine and New York have not responded with an offer to display the work.

“It’s very topical,” said Christopher Crosman, director of the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland and a regular visitor to Indiana’s place on Vinalhaven. “I wouldn’t hesitate to show it but there are other works I am more interested in from an aesthetic point of view. I would love to see it in the context of his other work or in a show of art on the same subject. That would be stunning. Instead of running it as a stand-alone, I would prefer to have it in an exhibit of artists’ responses to September 11.”

Indiana has been back to ground zero four times since that tragic day, and he hopes that one of his “LOVE” sculptures will eventually be erected near the site.

In other words, Indiana’s longtime affair with New York is not over. His revived interest in being a presence in the city persists despite the fact that the New York art world seemed to dismiss him from the list of trendy Pop artists, which included his friends Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, after the rampant commercial success of the original “LOVE” painting.

Recently, Indiana has longed for firmer placement among the luminaries of 20th century art and, even more, for a New York museum retrospective of his work.

“I’ve always had a fairly rough time in New York on the highest level,” said Indiana, who purchased the Vinalhaven place in 1969 and moved there permanently in the late ’70s. “Just as Ellsworth Kelly was offended by me putting words on canvas, so were a lot of other artists. People like paintings that look like paintings. But I am a sign painter and very proud to be a sign painter. Obviously, I am also an American. I pride myself on being the most American of American artists.”

In his eccentrically opulent and handsome island home, Indiana has gathered a meticulous and exhaustive account of his own life. Archival files, journals, clippings, photos, books and magazine covers take up wall and shelf space. Hanging on one wall leading to an upstairs room are portraits from his early years at the Chicago Institute of Art.

Indiana’s downstairs studio, where “Afghanistan” is displayed, is also filled with works-in-progress. A tour of the building’s four floors and through a studio across the street reveals a massive collection of earlier work – the Marsden Hartley series (Hartley, a Maine native, also lived on Vinalhaven for a while), the Marilyn Monroe series (which was recently shown in France), and the “66” series (a tribute to his father, who abandoned the family by driving away on Route 66 in the state of Indiana, the name Robert Clark would eventually take as his nom d’art).

New to the roundup are large red, white and blue American flag panels painted on the doors of the residence. Indiana has placed American flags on poles atop the widow’s walk on the building’s highest level. From the ferry at the other end of town, the flags wave like a victory emblem in wartime.

Clearly, Indiana, at 74, is as busy as ever and eager to re-establish himself in the conversations of art critics and historians. It’s still too early to know if “Afghanistan” will be his return vehicle, but his determination is unflagging. His career has stayed viable in Europe but that’s not enough for Indiana, who seeks honor on the home front.

Europe, after all, has never been his focus or goal. Indiana’s life and art and love are all about being American.

“If you offer Bob a cigar that’s not American, he doesn’t want it,” said Dan O’Leary. “Most connoisseurs love a Cuban cigar. Not Bob. For him, it’s all about America and that’s it. He smokes American cigars only.”

Of course, it is not just American cigars but national kudos that Indiana wants now.

“The world in general probably couldn’t care less about this,” said Indiana, speaking of his new work. “I presume the peacenik part of the world probably won’t exactly love this painting, but with art people, I hope ‘Afghanistan’ will bring me back to New York.”

While few would dispute Indiana’s place in art history, some might find that, in a climate of cultural tolerance during global threat, the newest work echoes a complaint of offensiveness Indiana has heard in the past. Some may even find the piece vindictive. But Indiana maintains that “Afghanistan” is a return to his signature theme: love.

“Afghanistan,” he says, is about “lack of love.”