Jamie Wyeth

“As a child, I always wanted to live on a boat.”

“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.”

“I just can't whip off a likeness of somebody.”

“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.”

“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.”

“My father's work is rather mysterious, not much said, and my grandfather's is robust, bursting off the walls.”

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

“I had been elected to the National Academy of Design in New York, and one of the requirements was that you give a portrait, a self-portrait of yourself.”

“I'm a terrible technician, and I have a very hard time painting.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Painting is such an individual profession. I'm not performing. There's no audience.”

“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 paint every day. I really have no hobbies. That's all I do.”

“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.”

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

“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.”