Top 100 Wyeth Quotes
#1. My father brought me a box of books once when I was about three and a half or four. I remember the carton they were in and the covers with illustrations by Newell C. Wyeth.
Paula Fox
#2. After being an Impressionist, Cubist, and an Abstract Expressionist, I was influenced by realistic artists, including Andrew Wyeth in the late '50s, and I haven't changed my style since.
Robert Bateman
#3. It's the hardest work in the world to try not to work. - N.C. Wyeth
Mason Currey
#4. Ethan Wyeth: I hope you're thirsty."
Gideon Wyeth:"Why?"
Ethan: "Cause your dumb and ugly, but I can do something about thirsty.
Orson Scott Card
#5. The great thing about a painter is that he or she lives on - I mean, Andrew Wyeth is more in his paintings than he was walking around.
Jamie Wyeth
#6. The problem with having the name Wyeth is that immediately, when people hear the name, they all of a sudden see weathered barns in a field or something.
Jamie Wyeth
#7. Art was a way of life in my family. My grandfather, N.C. Wyeth, who died a year before I was born, had been a prominent painter. So was my father, Andrew. My two aunts and two of my uncles also earned a living as painters.
Jamie Wyeth
#8. My father's like - it's as if he was transparent. He's a man of great mystery, whereas apparently N.C. Wyeth was 6-feet, 2-inches tall, with a booming voice. I think that's reflected in their work.
Jamie Wyeth
#9. Maine likes to call itself 'America's Vacationland.' For many artists, though, it's the office. Since the 19th century, painters from all over the country - including Edward Hopper, Alex Katz, John Marin, Fairfield Porter, Neil Welliver and Andrew Wyeth - have spent large chunks of time there.
Terry Teachout
#10. Most artists look for something fresh to paint; frankly I find that quite boring. For me it is much more exciting to find fresh meaning in something familiar.
Andrew Wyeth
#11. The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology.
Jamie Wyeth
#12. I mostly paint animals I'm familiar with, but I did a series of paintings of ravens, so I read everything about them.
Jamie Wyeth
#13. If you paint a man leaning over your own back must ache
N. C. Wyeth
#14. Nothing is more uninteresting than completely knowing somebody, being totally at ease.
Jamie Wyeth
#15. My aim is not to exhibit craft, but rather to submerge it, and make it rightfully the handmaiden of beauty, power and emotional content.
Andrew Wyeth
#16. Painting is such an individual profession. I'm not performing. There's no audience.
Jamie Wyeth
#17. Painting is as difficult as brain surgery. It's not that relaxing. But that's the discipline.
Jamie Wyeth
#18. Treasure Island is completed! The entire set of seventeen canvases without one break in my enthusiasm and spirit. Better in every quality than anything I ever did.
N. C. Wyeth
#19. It's a shock for me to go through and see all those years of painting my life, which is very personal for me. It's a very difficult thing for an artist to look back at his work.
Andrew Wyeth
#20. To have all your life's work and to have them along the wall, it's like walking in with no clothes on. It's terrible.
Andrew Wyeth
#21. It's a moment that I'm after, a fleeting moment, but not a frozen moment.
Andrew Wyeth
#22. All my problems and anxieties certainly come out of my work, and that's the way it should be. Other than that, relationships with people I find very, very simple.
Jamie Wyeth
#23. My father was a great inspiration, and there was a bit of competition between us. He'd work in his studio, and I'd work in my space, but the door was always half open.
Jamie Wyeth
#25. Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art. It is important to forget about what you are doing - then a work of art may happen.
Andrew Wyeth
#26. When I paint a portrait I want to know more than just the looks of the person. I want to know how they live and what their feelings are ... It then becomes more than just physiognomy, but the feel of the person.
Jamie Wyeth
#27. I just can't whip off a likeness of somebody.
Jamie Wyeth
#28. We lived in my father's studio, so there were the brushes and the pencils and the paint. So it would - it was very natural for me to want to paint, I think, and it was never a question.
Jamie Wyeth
#29. To me, dance is so ethereal and elusive, so much of an illusion. After a performance, that's it. With vocals and music, you have good recordings.
Jamie Wyeth
#30. Really, if you get to know pigs, they're very moody. They're not sweet little animals at all. That's what I like about them. They get depressed; they get into these snits. They're carnivorous.
Jamie Wyeth
#31. You think you're developing and getting better and then you see something you did years ago. Looking at your early work.. sometimes it has a depth that surprises you.
Andrew Wyeth
#32. As a child, I always wanted to live on a boat.
Jamie Wyeth
#33. What you have to do is break all the rules.
Andrew Wyeth
#34. I love to study the many things that grow below the corn stalks and bring them back to the studio to study the color. If one could only catch that true color of nature - the very thought of it drives me mad.
Andrew Wyeth
#35. Well, being the youngest child and frail, I was left alone a great deal of the time.
Andrew Wyeth
#36. I'm not just interested in fascinating faces or trees. I want to bore in deeper.
Jamie Wyeth
#37. I have hundreds of art books and the biographies of artists I love, such as Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas.
Jamie Wyeth
#38. I hope the time will never come when I shall feel satisfied. To reach the goal of one's ambitions must be tragic.
N. C. Wyeth
#39. There's a quality of life in Maine which is this singular and unique. I think. It's absolutely a world onto itself.
Jamie Wyeth
#40. My interest in painting is recording things. I think of myself as almost a documentary filmmaker ... I've gotten into some curious situations ...
Jamie Wyeth
#41. I prefer winter and fall, when you can feel the bone structure in the landscape
the lonliness of it
the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it
the whole story dosen't show.
Andrew Wyeth
#42. I don't think that there is anything that is really magical unless it has a terrifying quality.
Andrew Wyeth
#43. Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.
Jamie Wyeth
#44. I don't really have studios. I wander around around people's attics, out in fields, in cellars, anyplace I find that invites me.
Andrew Wyeth
#45. My sketchbooks are usually just a line on one page or a circle, which to most people must be totally meaningless. But to me, they are very important to the thing I am working on.
Jamie Wyeth
#46. At 18 I began painting steadily fulltime and at age 20 had my first New York show at the Macbeth Gallery.
Andrew Wyeth
#47. I'm a very strange painter. I don't wake up one day and say, 'God, isn't this a fantastic day, I'd better get out and paint!' I think my father's more that way, because he's very fast.
Jamie Wyeth
#48. I think you have to use your eyes as well as your emotion, and one without the other just doesn't work
Andrew Wyeth
#49. With a creature, there's no voice, so the eyes become the voice. When you get eye-to-eye contact, a real connection, it's limitless - and incredibly thrilling.
Jamie Wyeth
#50. The things that I paint are things that I know very well.
Jamie Wyeth
#51. I immediately doubt things if I become satisfied with them. Being satisfied by something is a real danger for me. I hope I never lose that. That would be death.
Jamie Wyeth
#52. I spent a lot of time alone; I left school to be tutored. So, most of my companions were animals. It's as simple as that. I knew more animals than I did people.
Jamie Wyeth
#53. I had been elected to the National Academy of Design in New York, and one of the requirements was that you give a portrait, a self-portrait of yourself.
Jamie Wyeth
#54. When painting portraits a lot of people say, 'Why not get a photograph of the person?' Photography is wonderful and it is an art form in itself, but ... my portrait is a culmination of elements ... a truer image of a person than just the 'click' of a snapshot.
Jamie Wyeth
#55. I'm a secretive bastard. I would never let anybody watch me painting ... it would be like somebody watching you have sex - painting is that personal to me.
Andrew Wyeth
#56. It's all in how you arrange the thing ... the careful balance of the design is the motion.
Andrew Wyeth
#57. Interesting is when one can produce a picture that is pretty, but with undercurrents. The metaphor that comes to mind is in the poems of Robert Frost.
Jamie Wyeth
#58. I'm an odd portrait painter in that I'm not just interested in human faces. I consider almost all of my paintings to be portraits.
Jamie Wyeth
#59. I search for the realness, the real feeling of a subject, all the texture around it ... I always want to see the third dimension of something ... I want to come alive with the object.
Andrew Wyeth
#60. Dance looks absurd on film, I think, like little puppets moving around.
Jamie Wyeth
#61. I paint every day. I really have no hobbies. That's all I do.
Jamie Wyeth
#62. My struggle is to preserve that abstract flash - like something you caught out of the corner of your eye, but in the picture you can look at it directly.
Andrew Wyeth
#63. One's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes.
Andrew Wyeth
#64. I'm a terrible technician, and I have a very hard time painting.
Jamie Wyeth
#65. Believe in yourself and believe in love. Love something.
Andrew Wyeth
#66. I view anything on this farm as model. I actually painted Union Rags as a yearling.
Jamie Wyeth
#67. My aunt Caroline was really a character. She lived and worked in my grandfather's old house and even wore some of his clothes.
Jamie Wyeth
#68. Being a painter is the only profession where you have to stand there with all your shortcomings on the wall.
Jamie Wyeth
#69. And, of course, I began drawing so much - wild, undisciplined pencil drawings and watercolors of knights battling and such.
Andrew Wyeth
#70. I think a person permeates a spot, and a lost presence makes the environment timeless to me, keeps an area alive. It pulsates because of that.
Andrew Wyeth
#71. The real kiss of death - particularly with my father - is the extraordinary popularity of his work.
Jamie Wyeth
#72. Most of my reading is based on what I'm working on. I did a series of paintings based on the seven deadly sins, so I read Dante and then Milton's 'Paradise Lost.' That was a bit hard going.
Jamie Wyeth
#73. My aim is to escape from the medium with which I work; to leave no residue of technical mannerisms to stand between my expression and the observer. To seek freedom through significant form and design rather than through the diversion of so-called free and accidental brush handling.
Andrew Wyeth
#74. I wanted to get it all down, maybe out of my system. I wanted to be able to say, Everything's possible-if you believe and can get excited.
Andrew Wyeth
#75. I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.
Andrew Wyeth
#76. Animals are not cute. They are disturbing. Pigs do eat their young. Actually, I hate pigs. I just happen to have some who are friends of mine.
Jamie Wyeth
#77. I'm not at all interested in painting the object just as it is in nature. Certainly I'm much more interested in the mood of a thing than the truth of a thing.
Andrew Wyeth
#78. I never knew my grandfather. He died the year before I was born. But as a child, he did, of course, those wonderful illustrations, 'Treasure Island,' and whatnot.
Jamie Wyeth
#79. Painting is a field that attracts a lot of lazy people. You can just sort of sit and wait for things to come to you. I know a lot of painters who'll sit and chat it up all night. But God, I just can't do that.
Jamie Wyeth
#80. I've never studied the Japanese. That's something that must have crept in there. But the Japanese are my biggest clients. They seem to like the elemental quality.
Andrew Wyeth
#81. I've tried never to be easily satisfied, and I've been painting like fury now for forty years ... I have a feeling. You paint about as far as your emotions go, and that's about it.
Andrew Wyeth
#82. My father's work is rather mysterious, not much said, and my grandfather's is robust, bursting off the walls.
Jamie Wyeth
#83. When you lose your simplicity, you lose your drama.
Andrew Wyeth
#84. Painting to me is constant searching. I can see what I want, but I can't get there, and yet you have to be open enough that if it goes another way, then let it go that way.
Jamie Wyeth
#85. I think one's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes. I see no reason for painting but that. If I have anything to offer, it is my emotional contact with the place where I live and the people I do.
Andrew Wyeth
#86. Growing up in Chadds Ford, Pa., I shuttled between studio space in my parents' house and my grandfather's studio just up the hill. It was a solitary childhood, but I loved it.
Jamie Wyeth
#87. I can't work completely out of my imagination. I must put my foot in a bit of truth; and then I can fly free.
Andrew Wyeth
#89. If somehow I can, before I leave this earth, combine my absolutely mad freedom and excitement with truth, then I will have done something.
Andrew Wyeth
#90. Really, I think one's art goes only as far and as deep as your love goes
Andrew Wyeth
#91. I get letters from people about my work. The thing that pleases me most is that my work touches their feelings. In fact, they don't talk about the paintings. They end up telling me the story of their life or how their father died.
Andrew Wyeth
#92. From my earliest memories, my aunt was squirting out oil paint. I could just eat it. I would go from her studio and walk down to my father's house, and there he was, working in egg tempera.
Jamie Wyeth
#93. If you clean it up, get analytical, all the subtle joy and emotion you felt in the first place goes flying out the window.
Andrew Wyeth
#94. I'm a very boring person, and all I do is want to paint and to record what I feel moves me or what interests me, and that can be in the form of a pig or in the form of President Kennedy.
Jamie Wyeth
#95. To me, this was an oxymoron, doing a painting of a dancer. Dancers are always moving.
Jamie Wyeth
#96. I think anything like that-
which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone-
people always feel sad. Is it because we've lost the art of being alone?
Andrew Wyeth
#97. The quality I most loved in Warhol - it was his sense of wonder. I mean, he was - absolutely everything was, 'Oh my God, isn't that wonderful!'. You know, and so it wasn't that he was cool and kind of calculated at all. He was very childlike.
Jamie Wyeth
#98. I have copies of the books my grandfather illustrated for Scribner's in each house. I read those books all the time.
Jamie Wyeth
#99. God, I've frozen my ass off painting snow scenes!
Andrew Wyeth
#100. Warhol had a huge effect on me. It wasn't that I sought it out. It was more of a natural evolution.
Jamie Wyeth
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