Andrew Wyeth Quotations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

My aim is to escape from the medium with which I work.

And, of course, I began drawing so much - wild, undisciplined pencil drawings and watercolors of knights battling and such.

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

I had whooping cough when I was very young, which left me with bronchial problems, and I would always pick up colds. I was very thin and nervous so my father and mother took me out of school and had me tutored at home.

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.

My pencil is like a fencer's foil.

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. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape-the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.

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.

With watercolour, you can pick up the atmosphere, the temperature, the sound of snow shifting through the trees or over the ice of a small pond or against a windowpane. Watercolour perfectly expresses the free side of my nature.

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.

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.

I surrender to the 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.

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

Well, being the youngest child and frail, I was left alone a great deal of the time.

I am not a juicy painter.

God, I've frozen my ass off painting snow scenes!

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.

The most irritating experience for an artist is to have his work criticized before it is finished.

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.

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.

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'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.

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 can't work completely out of my imagination-I must put my foot in a bit of truth-and then I can fly free.

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 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.

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.

I have a good friend, Rudolf Serkin, the pianist, a very sensitive man. I was talking to him one day backstage after a concert and I told him that I thought he had played particularly sensitively that day. I said, "You know, many pianists are brilliant, they strike the keys so well, but somehow you are different." "Ah," he said, "I don't think you should ever strike a key. You should pull the keys with your fingers."

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.

When you lose your simplicity, you lose your drama.

What you have to do is break all the rules.

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

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.

Believe in yourself and believe in love. Love something.

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.