Jamie Wyeth Quotes

Oddly enough, my grandfather probably had more of an influence on me than my father.

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.

The quality I most loved in Warhol - it was his sense of wonder. I mean, he was - absolutely everything was, 'Oh my God, isn't that wonderful!'. You know, and so it wasn't that he was cool and kind of calculated at all. He was very childlike.

There's a quality of life in Maine which is this singular and unique. I think. It's absolutely a world onto itself.

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.

Art was a way of life in my family. My grandfather, N.C. Wyeth, who died a year before I was born, had been a prominent painter. So was my father, Andrew. My two aunts and two of my uncles also earned a living as painters.

Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.

My aunt Caroline was really a character. She lived and worked in my grandfather's old house and even wore some of his clothes.

My father's work is rather mysterious, not much said, and my grandfather's is robust, bursting off the walls.

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.

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.

I have continued to paint; my father - who was savaged by the critics - continued to paint until practically the last week of his life.

The real kiss of death - particularly with my father - is the extraordinary popularity of his work.

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.

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.

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.

I have hundreds of art books and the biographies of artists I love, such as Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas.

My father was a great inspiration, and there was a bit of competition between us. He'd work in his studio, and I'd work in my space, but the door was always half open.

I paint every day. I really have no hobbies. That's all I do.

When painting portraits a lot of people say, 'Why not get a photograph of the person?' Photography is wonderful and it is an art form in itself, but ... my portrait is a culmination of elements ... a truer image of a person than just the 'click' of a snapshot.

Painting is as difficult as brain surgery. It's not that relaxing. But that's the discipline.

To me, this was an oxymoron, doing a painting of a dancer. Dancers are always moving.

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.

I have copies of the books my grandfather illustrated for Scribner's in each house. I read those books all the time.

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.

I learned from a longtime farmer that pigs enjoy soothing music.

Nothing is more uninteresting than completely knowing somebody, being totally at ease.

I'm a terrible technician, and I have a very hard time painting.

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.

The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology.