“Painting is a field that attracts a lot of lazy people. You can just sort of sit and wait for things to come to you. I know a lot of painters who’ll sit and chat it up all night. But God, I just can’t do that.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“There’s a quality of life in Maine which is this singular and unique. I think. It’s absolutely a world onto itself.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“I just can’t whip off a likeness of somebody.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“Animals are not cute. They are disturbing. Pigs do eat their young. Actually, I hate pigs. I just happen to have some who are friends of mine.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“To me, dance is so ethereal and elusive, so much of an illusion. After a performance, that’s it. With vocals and music, you have good recordings.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“I thought to live on an island was like living on a boat. Islands intrigue me. You can see the perimeters of your world. It’s a microcosm.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“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.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“I began drawing when I was nearly 3, and after finishing the sixth grade, I left school to paint and was tutored at home. My father didn’t think a formal education was necessary for a painter.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“Growing up in Chadds Ford, Pa., I shuttled between studio space in my parents’ house and my grandfather’s studio just up the hill. It was a solitary childhood, but I loved it.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“My father was a great inspiration, and there was a bit of competition between us. He’d work in his studio, and I’d work in my space, but the door was always half open.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“The real kiss of death – particularly with my father – is the extraordinary popularity of his work.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“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.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“The great thing about a painter is that he or she lives on – I mean, Andrew Wyeth is more in his paintings than he was walking around.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“I have continued to paint; my father – who was savaged by the critics – continued to paint until practically the last week of his life.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“I learned from a longtime farmer that pigs enjoy soothing music.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“I paint every day. I really have no hobbies. That’s all I do.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“The things that I paint are things that I know very well.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“We lived in my father’s studio, so there were the brushes and the pencils and the paint. So it would – it was very natural for me to want to paint, I think, and it was never a question.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“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.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“The quality I most loved in Warhol – it was his sense of wonder. I mean, he was – absolutely everything was, ‘Oh my God, isn’t that wonderful!’. You know, and so it wasn’t that he was cool and kind of calculated at all. He was very childlike.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“With a creature, there’s no voice, so the eyes become the voice. When you get eye-to-eye contact, a real connection, it’s limitless – and incredibly thrilling.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“Nothing is more uninteresting than completely knowing somebody, being totally at ease.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“Being a painter is the only profession where you have to stand there with all your shortcomings on the wall.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“To me, this was an oxymoron, doing a painting of a dancer. Dancers are always moving.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“Dance looks absurd on film, I think, like little puppets moving around.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“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.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“My father’s like – it’s as if he was transparent. He’s a man of great mystery, whereas apparently N.C. Wyeth was 6-feet, 2-inches tall, with a booming voice. I think that’s reflected in their work.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“My father’s work is rather mysterious, not much said, and my grandfather’s is robust, bursting off the walls.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“The whole consideration of – … am I being compared as such and such’s grandson and son – that was minuscule compared to the problems I was having just working… I didn’t have time to start worrying about who I was in the eyes of the public.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“My aunt Caroline was really a character. She lived and worked in my grandfather’s old house and even wore some of his clothes.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“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.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“Warhol had a huge effect on me. It wasn’t that I sought it out. It was more of a natural evolution.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“I’m not just interested in fascinating faces or trees. I want to bore in deeper.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“I have copies of the books my grandfather illustrated for Scribner’s in each house. I read those books all the time.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“I have hundreds of art books and the biographies of artists I love, such as Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“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.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“I mostly paint animals I’m familiar with, but I did a series of paintings of ravens, so I read everything about them.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“As a child, I always wanted to live on a boat.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“I’m a terrible technician, and I have a very hard time painting.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“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.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“Really, if you get to know pigs, they’re very moody. They’re not sweet little animals at all. That’s what I like about them. They get depressed; they get into these snits. They’re carnivorous.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“Oddly enough, my grandfather probably had more of an influence on me than my father.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“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.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“My father, whose work I adore… was down working on little things of grass and dead birds. Well, that didn’t interest me. As an 8-year-old kid, I wanted knights in armor and so forth.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“All my problems and anxieties certainly come out of my work, and that’s the way it should be. Other than that, relationships with people I find very, very simple.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“I’m a very strange painter. I don’t wake up one day and say, ‘God, isn’t this a fantastic day, I’d better get out and paint!’ I think my father’s more that way, because he’s very fast.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“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.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“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.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“I view anything on this farm as model. I actually painted Union Rags as a yearling.”
― Jamie Wyeth
“Painting is such an individual profession. I’m not performing. There’s no audience.”
― Jamie Wyeth
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