PORTLAND – The Maine College of Art will honor 87-year-old Andrew Wyeth with a lifetime achievement award this week as interest in the artist’s work proves just as enduring as he is.

As it happens, the Farnsworth Art Museum and Wyeth Study Center in Rockland are showing more than 50 of his early watercolors, as well as a rotation of Wyeth’s tempera works. Meanwhile, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Philadelphia Museum of Art are organizing a Wyeth retrospective of 100 works, to open this fall.

Now is an appropriate time to study Wyeth’s life and work, said Christine Vincent, president of Maine College of Art.

“Over the past four or five years, we’ve been moving through the icons of American artists who are associated with Maine – Alex Katz, Robert Indiana are other recent winners of this award.

“But if you’re talking about people with iconic status, Andrew Wyeth has to be included in there at the very top,” she said. “I can’t think of a better time to salute him.”

Wyeth is not expected to attend the banquet Thursday at the Holiday Inn by the Bay in Portland. He will send his son Nicholas instead.

Anne d’Harnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will present Wyeth’s award.

Wyeth lives most of the year in Chadds Ford, Pa., but has spent summers since his youth in midcoast Maine.

“I paint the things that emotionally mean a lot to me,” Wyeth said recently in a telephone interview from his home in Pennsylvania, the Maine Sunday Telegram reported.

“One goes as far as one’s heart takes him. Anything else to me is just a technical trick,” he said. “To try to catch something you have seen and lived with, to try to catch that in its excitement and mood, that’s the whole excitement of painting to me.

“I just can’t make up something. It’s got to be something I have felt.”

Anne Knutson, curator of the Atlanta-Philadelphia exhibition, expects the museum retrospective to elevate Wyeth’s status.

“When I was in school, everybody said, ‘Nobody wants to study Andy Wyeth,'” she said. “Academics have always allied him with the illustrative tradition, and anything to do with illustration was shunned for years. But that’s not fair. With this show, we really want to look a new and look hard at Wyeth’s art, because there is a lot there.”

Preparing for his annual return to his summer home near Port Clyde, Wyeth chooses not to look back.

“I’m always more interested in the future than what I have done in the past,” he said.

Son Jamie Wyeth, the painter, remembers coming of age in Port Clyde.

“Our house was his studio. Paints were lying around everywhere. If I saw somebody put on a tie and go out into an office, it would have been a shock. Painting was second nature,” he said.

“My dad had an amazing work ethic, and still does. He would paint constantly, and it had an effect on me. His lesson was that you take it seriously. You either do it or you don’t do it. If you do it, you do it all the time.”