Top 54 Quotes & Sayings by Andrew Wyeth

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 really have studios. I wander around around people's attics, out in fields, in cellars, anyplace I find that invites me.

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.

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

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.

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'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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 am not a juicy painter.

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.

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

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 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 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.

My pencil is like a fencer's foil.

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'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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

What you have to do is break all the rules.

When you lose your simplicity, you lose your drama.

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

Believe in yourself and believe in love. Love something.

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

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.