N. C. Wyeth Quotes

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.

Believe in yourself and believe in love. Love something.

Painting to me is constant searching. I can see what I want, but I can't get there, and yet you have to be open enough that if it goes another way, then let it go that way.

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.

I think one's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes.

I don't think that there is anything that is really magical unless it has a terrifying quality.

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

When you lose your simplicity, you lose your drama.

I think you have to use your eyes as well as your emotion, and one without the other just doesn't work

What you have to do is break all the rules.

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

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

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 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.

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

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 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.

Don't overdo it, don't underdo it. Do it just on the line.

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.

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

I hope the time will never come when I shall feel satisfied. To reach the goal of one's ambitions must be tragic.

Painting is as difficult as brain surgery. It's not that relaxing. But that's the discipline.

If you paint a man leaning over your own back must ache

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.

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.

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

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.

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

Painting and illustration cannot be mixed—one cannot merge from one into the other.

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.

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 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.

My interest in painting is recording things. I think of myself as almost a documentary filmmaker... I've gotten into some curious situations.

The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology.

Interesting is when one can produce a picture that is pretty, but with undercurrents. The metaphor that comes to mind is in the poems of Robert Frost.

I'm an odd portrait painter in that I'm not just interested in human faces. I consider almost all of my paintings to be portraits.

Treasure Island is completed! The entire set of seventeen canvases without one break in my enthusiasm and spirit. Better in every quality than anything I ever did.

I am not a juicy painter.

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

My pencil is like a fencer's foil.

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.

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.