When I'm painting in the late afternoon and I'm working on a passage in a painting, the feeling I'm trying to get is this feeling of home, it's a feeling of place and time.
Bo Bartlett
“I grew up in Georgia and didn't know much about art. There was a small museum, but otherwise there wasn't much art around. So the only art that I knew was art that came into the house on the cover of magazines, you know, Saturday Evening Post and Norman Rockwell or LIFE and Look magazines, where there were some Andrew Wyeth articles. So that's the only way I knew what art was or contemporary art was. And there was also Salvador Dalí and Picasso and things like that and maybe Jackson Pollock. But it was the Wyeth that really I connected with, because it just had a resonance for me, even as a small child.”
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“In the art world, Andrew Wyeth was thought of as a sort of Regionalist or sort of a downhome painter at the time. And maybe just the populism of it, you know, because he was so popular—and I think Andy, in a way, was affected by all of the imitators. His reputation was affected by all of the imitators. So you had all of these people painting bad barn paintings and bad landscapes with detailed grass.”
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“Paint what you're excited by, so anything that excites you is a key as a way in. You have to trust that. And so [Andy would] like the way the light was hitting a tree on the riverbank. So he'd go and sit and start drawing that light hitting the tree on the riverbank. And then if he is still involved with it and engaged with it and excited by it, he would start watercoloring it. And then he would disappear, what he'd say is [...] you have to be like a pair of floating eyes. You have to be like a pair of floating eyes, which meant, I think, that you don't exist. The ego doesn't exist. You're only seeing with clarity and with pure vision, and so therefore you disappear.”
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“When you paint your own backyard, what you know and what you love, with truth and with integrity, then what happens is everybody—that's a universal. That love is universal. And that's what people see. And that's when people look at his paintings. And they're looking at them in awe. And the hair is standing up on the back of their neck. They're getting it. They’re tapping into life and they're tapping into what Andrew Wyeth, by painting his own world, painted a universal that we all can see and experience. And it's that connection ... it's that kind of connection that we long for.”
Auction Results Bo Bartlett
