Top 33 Jamie Wyeth Quotes

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

The problem with having the name Wyeth is that immediately, when people hear the name, they all of a sudden see weathered barns in a field or something.

All my problems and anxieties certainly come out of my work, and that’s the way it should be. Other than that, relationships with people I find very, very simple.

My sketchbooks are usually just a line on one page or a circle, which to most people must be totally meaningless. But to me, they are very important to the thing I am working on.

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

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.

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.

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

Dance looks absurd on film, I think, like little puppets moving around.

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

I just can’t whip off a likeness of somebody.

From my earliest memories, my aunt was squirting out oil paint. I could just eat it. I would go from her studio and walk down to my father’s house, and there he was, working in egg tempera.

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 spent a lot of time alone; I left school to be tutored. So, most of my companions were animals. It’s as simple as that. I knew more animals than I did people.

I mostly paint animals I’m familiar with, but I did a series of paintings of ravens, so I read everything about them.

I’m a very boring person, and all I do is want to paint and to record what I feel moves me or what interests me, and that can be in the form of a pig or in the form of President Kennedy.

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

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

Most of my reading is based on what I’m working on. I did a series of paintings based on the seven deadly sins, so I read Dante and then Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost.’ That was a bit hard going.

Painting is a field that attracts a lot of lazy people. You can just sort of sit and wait for things to come to you. I know a lot of painters who’ll sit and chat it up all night. But God, I just can’t do that.

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

The great thing about a painter is that he or she lives on – I mean, Andrew Wyeth is more in his paintings than he was walking around.

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

The whole consideration of – … am I being compared as such and such’s grandson and son – that was minuscule compared to the problems I was having just working… I didn’t have time to start worrying about who I was in the eyes of the public.

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 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.

Warhol had a huge effect on me. It wasn’t that I sought it out. It was more of a natural evolution.

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.

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

The things that I paint are things that I know very well.

Being a painter is the only profession where you have to stand there with all your shortcomings on the wall.

Growing up in Chadds Ford, Pa., I shuttled between studio space in my parents’ house and my grandfather’s studio just up the hill. It was a solitary childhood, but I loved it.

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