Andrew Wyeth Quotes

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.

My aim is not to exhibit craft, but rather to submerge it, and make it rightfully the handmaiden of beauty, power and emotional content.

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.

I don’t really have studios. I wander around around people’s attics, out in fields, in cellars, anyplace I find that invites me.

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.

I surrendered to a world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare.

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.

It’s all in how you arrange the thing… the careful balance of the design is the motion.

What you have to do is break all the rules.

I think one’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes.

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.

If somehow I can, before I leave this earth, combine my absolutely mad freedom and excitement with truth, then I will have done something.

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.

I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future – the timelessness of the rocks and the hills – all the people who have existed there.

If you clean it up, get analytical, all the subtle joy and emotion you felt in the first place goes flying out the window.

When you lose your simplicity, you lose your drama.

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.

It’s a moment that I’m after, a fleeting moment, but not a frozen moment.

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.

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.

I dream a lot. I do more painting when I’m not painting. It’s in the subconscious.

There’s a quote from Hamlet that is my guide… He tells the players not to exaggerate but to hold a mirror up to nature. Don’t overdo it, don’t underdo it. Do it just on the line.

To be interested solely in technique would be a very superficial thing to me.

To be interested solely in technique would be a very superficial thing to me. If I have an emotion, before I die, that’s deeper than any emotion that I’ve ever had, then I will paint a more powerful picture that will have nothing to do with just technique, but will go beyond it.

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.

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.

Believe in yourself and believe in love. Love something.

I don’t think that there is anything that is really magical unless it has a terrifying quality.

If it [talent] isn’t strong enough to take the gaff of real training, then it’s not worth much.

Don’t overdo it, don’t underdo it. Do it just on the line.

At 18 I began painting steadily fulltime and at age 20 had my first New York show at the Macbeth Gallery.

I think you have to use your eyes as well as your emotion, and one without the other just doesn’t work

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.

One’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes.