ANDREW WYETH

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 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 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.

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

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.

Believe in yourself and believe in love. Love something.

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

My pencil is like a fencer's foil.

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

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.

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'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.

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.

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.