Jamie Wyeth Quotes

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

I don't paint women, I paint pictures. . . What I am after above all is expression. If in a portrait I put eyes, a nose, a mouth, there isn't much use; on the contrary it paralyses the imagination of the spectator, and obliges us to see the person in a certain way.

I think everything's fair in art and how you perceive a character.

Photography... is either an expression of a cosmic vision, an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing - to me. (1919)

Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing.

What counts is putting the intensity that you yourself have experienced into the picture. Otherwise it is just a document.

I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.

I've always been so surprised by how people interpret my photos in context.

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

Fine art is knowledge made visible.

It's hard for me to assess what I brought because each time you pick up a camera and point it at a person, you're trying to define that person so to talk generally is difficult because I have to think of a given image in order to conjure up what we're talking about.

When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't.

It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work.

That's what I paint, I paint people. They're portraits, but you won't always be pleased with the way you look in my paintings. Which is fine, I guess. Unless you're buying it, and it's of your kid!

I have to experiment with methods and I'm trying to find an authentic way of making an equivalent of the living, breathing person within the limits of a single picture.

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.

A photograph is not an accident - it is a concept.

I believe that the medium of photography prevails entirely as an act of faith in the souls of those who love and practice it. And so every photograph becomes another subtle variation on the theme of the medium itself.

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

What I have to do is utilize as best I can the ideas which objects suggest to me, connect, fuse, and color in my way the shadows they cast within me, illumine them from the inside. And since of necessity my vision is quite different from that of the next man, my painting will interpret things in an entirely different manner even though it makes use of the same elements.

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.

One does not photograph something simply for 'what it is', but 'for what else it is.

Let's put it this way - I photograph what interests me all the time. I live with the pictures to see what that thing looks like photographed. I'm saying the same thing; I'm not changing it.

Photography should be redefined. It's largely technical... Photography is just unbelievably limiting. I always think of David Bailey and all the fashion photographers - they overlap, you can't always tell who did it. I don't really even like photography all that much. I just think it's so overdone.

I want paint to work as flesh... my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them ... As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does.