Jamie Wyeth Quotes

To anyone who has served in Washington, there is something oddly familiar about [having your portrait painted]. First, you're painted into a corner, then you're hung out to dry and, finally, you're framed.

A man cannot paint portraits till he has seen faces.

Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.

A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth.

There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.

Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age.

I generally only paint people I know, I'm not a flatterer really.

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.

I painted with my husband a portrait of a naked Serge Gainsbourg draped with a French flag, and it hangs in our bedroom. I love gritty and dark art like what the German couple Herakut does.

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!

In art, there is no need for color; I see only light and shade. Give me a crayon, and I will paint your portrait.

I'm quite a precious painter; my style is a messy fine art - sort of impressionist. I do portraits, I love painting other artists, but recently, I've been playing around with self portraits, putting on different characters.

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 believe I have had the most trouble with a portrait which I painted in installments - the head on one canvas and the bust on another.

It is for the artist... in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.

When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form... one inevitably ends up with an egg.

And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.

I don't have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions.

Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.

And painted portraits have a life of their own that comes from deep in the soul of the painter and where the machine can't go.

In a portrait, you always leave part of yourself behind.

To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.

What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.

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.

I loathe my own face, and I've done self-portraits because I've had nobody else to do.