Andrew Wyeth

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“One's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes.”

“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 prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. 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'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.”

“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.”