Andrew Wyeth Quotes

I paint on the ground. I paint with sticks, with big paint cans, and whatever else falls in it. Basically, what I'm doing is capturing unbridled emotion and putting it on canvas. It's like capturing lightning in a bottle.

Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content.

For me, I am still very happy to be able to do stage design as it's an opportunity to express the extreme.

I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.

Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

I made one untitled piece.

I'll take anything and slap it on a canvas.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

At a certain point, I just put the building and the art impulse together. I decided that building was a legitimate way to make sculpture.

Sometimes I think that there's a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

I just wanted to paint and sketch and tell stories by drawing.

Donald Judd spoke of a 'neutral' surface, but what is meant? Neutrality must involve some relationship (to other ways of painting, thinking?) He would have to include these in his work to establish the neutrality of that surface. He also used 'non' or 'not' - expressive - this is an early problem - a negative solution or - expression of new sense - which can help one into - what one has not known. 'Neutral' expresses an intention.

But ‘art’ is not anything serious or exclusive: it is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger’s Vie de Boheme, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model: but the poetry, above all, of linseed oil and turpentine.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

Photography is unlike any other art form. In the other arts there is always a continuous interplay between the artist and his art. He has the painting or sculpture before him. What we have tried to do is to provide a medium for "artistic expression" to anyone with only a reasonable amount of time. By giving him a camera system with which he need only control his selection of focus, composition and lighting, we free him to select the moment and to criticize immediately what he has done. We enable him to see what else he wants to do on the basis of what he has just learned.

Photography is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It's a way of life.

The form of my painting is the content. My work is made of single or multiple panels: rectangle, curved, or square. I am less interested in marks on the panels than the 'presence' of the panels themselves. In Red Yellow Blue III the square panels present color. It was made to exist forever in the present; it is an idea and can be repeated anytime in the future.

Learn to draw. Try to make your hand so unconsciously adept that it will put down what you feel without your having to think of your hands. Then you can think of the thing before you.

The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature - translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive.

We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create.

A colourist makes his presence known even in a simple charcoal drawing.

Why should I need an artist to explain a work of art to me? Why should it not speak out to me itself?

I don't see those paintings as abstractions, especially because they are emblems of the inkblot. They aren't smashed together; they are constructed shape-by-shape, layer-by-layer, like any other picture.

As for a picture, if it isn't worth a thousand words, the hell with it.