Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I just can't whip off a likeness of somebody.
As a child, I always wanted to live on a boat.
Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.
The things that I paint are things that I know very well.
I paint every day. I really have no hobbies. That's all I do.
I'm a terrible technician, and I have a very hard time painting.
I learned from a longtime farmer that pigs enjoy soothing music.
Dance looks absurd on film, I think, like little puppets moving around.
I'm not just interested in fascinating faces or trees. I want to bore in deeper.
I view anything on this farm as model. I actually painted Union Rags as a yearling.
Painting is such an individual profession. I'm not performing. There's no audience.
Oddly enough, my grandfather probably had more of an influence on me than my father.
To me, this was an oxymoron, doing a painting of a dancer. Dancers are always moving.
Nothing is more uninteresting than completely knowing somebody, being totally at ease.
Painting is as difficult as brain surgery. It's not that relaxing. But that's the discipline.
Warhol had a huge effect on me. It wasn't that I sought it out. It was more of a natural evolution.
The real kiss of death - particularly with my father - is the extraordinary popularity of his work.
I have hundreds of art books and the biographies of artists I love, such as Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas.
Being a painter is the only profession where you have to stand there with all your shortcomings on the wall.
My father's work is rather mysterious, not much said, and my grandfather's is robust, bursting off the walls.
There's a quality of life in Maine which is this singular and unique. I think. It's absolutely a world onto itself.
I have copies of the books my grandfather illustrated for Scribner's in each house. I read those books all the time.
I mostly paint animals I'm familiar with, but I did a series of paintings of ravens, so I read everything about them.
The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology.
My aunt Caroline was really a character. She lived and worked in my grandfather's old house and even wore some of his clothes.
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.
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.
I have continued to paint; my father - who was savaged by the critics - continued to paint until practically the last week of his life.
I thought to live on an island was like living on a boat. Islands intrigue me. You can see the perimeters of your world. It's a microcosm.
My interest in painting is recording things. I think of myself as almost a documentary filmmaker... I've gotten into some curious situations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My father, whose work I adore... was down working on little things of grass and dead birds. Well, that didn't interest me. As an 8-year-old kid, I wanted knights in armor and so forth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I began drawing when I was nearly 3, and after finishing the sixth grade, I left school to paint and was tutored at home. My father didn't think a formal education was necessary for a painter.