Andrew Wyeth Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

I am not a juicy painter.

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

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

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

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'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 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.

What you have to do is break all the rules.

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."

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Believe in yourself and believe in love. Love something.

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

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

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.