Quotes from 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.

I paint every day. I really have no hobbies. That's all I do.

The things that I paint are things that I know very well.

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.

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.

To me, this was an oxymoron, doing a painting of a dancer. Dancers are always moving.

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.

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.

I mostly paint animals I'm familiar with, but I did a series of paintings of ravens, so I read everything about them.

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.

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.

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.

As a child, I always wanted to live on a boat.

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.

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.

Being a painter is the only profession where you have to stand there with all your shortcomings on the wall.

My father's work is rather mysterious, not much said, and my grandfather's is robust, bursting off the walls.

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.

Warhol had a huge effect on me. It wasn't that I sought it out. It was more of a natural evolution.

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.

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.

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.

I have continued to paint; my father - who was savaged by the critics - continued to paint until practically the last week of his life.

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.