Top 40 Andrew Wyeth Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Don’t overdo it, don’t underdo it. Do it just on the line.”

— Andrew Wyeth

2. “I dream a lot. I do more painting when I’m not painting. It’s in the subconscious.”

— Andrew Wyeth

3. “Believe in yourself and believe in love. Love something.”

— Andrew Wyeth

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

— Andrew Wyeth

5. “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.”

— Andrew Wyeth

6. “God, I’ve frozen my ass off painting snow scenes!”

— Andrew Wyeth

7. “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.”

— Andrew Wyeth

8. “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.”

— Andrew Wyeth

9. “I am not a juicy painter.”

— Andrew Wyeth

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

— Andrew Wyeth

11. “I don’t think that there is anything that is really magical unless it has a terrifying quality.”

— Andrew Wyeth

12. “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.”

— Andrew Wyeth

13. “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.”

— Andrew Wyeth

14. “It’s a moment that I’m after, a fleeting moment, but not a frozen moment.”

— Andrew Wyeth

15. “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.”

— Andrew Wyeth

16. “I think one’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes.”

— Andrew Wyeth

17. “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.”

— Andrew Wyeth

18. “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.”

— Andrew Wyeth

19. “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.”

— Andrew Wyeth

20. “What you have to do is break all the rules.”

— Andrew Wyeth

21. “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.”

— Andrew Wyeth

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

— Andrew Wyeth

23. “When you lose your simplicity, you lose your drama.”

— Andrew Wyeth

24. “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.”

— Andrew Wyeth

25. “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.”

— Andrew Wyeth

26. “My pencil is like a fencer’s foil.”

— Andrew Wyeth

27. “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.”

— Andrew Wyeth

28. “I don’t really have studios. I wander around around people’s attics, out in fields, in cellars, anyplace I find that invites me.”

— Andrew Wyeth

29. “Really, I think one’s art goes only as far and as deep as your love goes.”

— Andrew Wyeth

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

— Andrew Wyeth

31. “I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape – the loneliness of it – the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it – the whole story doesn’t show.”

— Andrew Wyeth

32. “And, of course, I began drawing so much – wild, undisciplined pencil drawings and watercolors of knights battling and such.”

— Andrew Wyeth

33. “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.”

— Andrew Wyeth

34. “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.”

— Andrew Wyeth

35. “My aim is not to exhibit craft, but rather to submerge it, and make it rightfully the handmaiden of beauty, power and emotional content.”

— Andrew Wyeth

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

— Andrew Wyeth

37. “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.”

— Andrew Wyeth

38. “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.”

— Andrew Wyeth

39. “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.”

— Andrew Wyeth

40. “I think you have to use your eyes as well as your emotion, and one without the other just doesn’t work.”

— Andrew Wyeth

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

— Andrew Wyeth

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

— Andrew Wyeth

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

— Andrew Wyeth