Andrew Wyeth Quotes - Page 2

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 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'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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

My pencil is like a fencer's foil.

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 am not a juicy painter.

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.

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

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

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.

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