Jamie Wyeth quotes:

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.

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.

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.

I have hundreds of art books and the biographies of artists I love, such as Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oddly enough, my grandfather probably had more of an influence on me than my father.

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

There's a quality of life in Maine which is this singular and unique. I think. It's absolutely a world onto itself.

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.

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.

I view anything on this farm as model. I actually painted Union Rags as a yearling.

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.

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

Painting to me is constant searching. I can see what I want, but I can't get there, and yet you have to be open enough that if it goes another way, then let it go that way.

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.

Nothing is more uninteresting than completely knowing somebody, being totally at ease.

I'm a terrible technician, and I have a very hard time painting.

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.

My aunt Caroline was really a character. She lived and worked in my grandfather's old house and even wore some of his clothes.

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.

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.

Dance looks absurd on film, I think, like little puppets moving around.

When I paint a portrait I want to know more than just the looks of the person. I want to know how they live and what their feelings are... It then becomes more than just physiognomy, but the feel of the person.

I just can't whip off a likeness of somebody.

I learned from a longtime farmer that pigs enjoy soothing music.

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.

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.

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.

The real kiss of death - particularly with my father - is the extraordinary popularity of his work.

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.

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.

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

Painting is as difficult as brain surgery. It's not that relaxing. But that's the discipline.

When painting portraits a lot of people say, 'Why not get a photograph of the person?' Photography is wonderful and it is an art form in itself, but... my portrait is a culmination of elements... a truer image of a person than just the 'click' of a snapshot.

The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology.

My interest in painting is recording things. I think of myself as almost a documentary filmmaker... I've gotten into some curious situations...

Painting to me is addictive. These are moments when it is inspiring, but they are few and far between. I keep my tools sharpened for the moment when things do start clicking, but that doesn't happen a lot. I really have to push myself sometimes. Painting is a profession in which it is very easy to be lazy, particularly if you have any degree of success.

I'm an odd portrait painter in that I'm not just interested in human faces. I consider almost all of my paintings to be portraits.

Interesting is when one can produce a picture that is pretty, but with undercurrents. The metaphor that comes to mind is in the poems of Robert Frost.

Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.