Nattier Portraits Quotes

I felt that the beach portraits were all self-portraits. That moment of unease, that attempt to find a pose, it was all about me. ~ Rineke Dijkstra

My dad was a photographer, so we had all these studio portraits of us. ~ Timothy Simons

I make figurative portraits as a way to explore theories of quantum physics. ~ Oliver Jeffers

I do not care to paint portraits indoors. I cannot feel sympathetic. ~ Joaquin Sorolla

What my portraits are made of?
10% reality, 90% my philosophy. ~ Scuro Chiaro

Improvisational things about picture-making ... learned from working with the small camera early on have served me well in being able to think quickly when making [portraits]. ~ Dawoud Bey

All photographs are self-portraits. ~ Minor White

Dreams are like portraits; and we find they please because they are confessed resemblances. ~ George Crabbe

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph. ~ Richard Avedon

I loathe my own face, and I've done self-portraits because I've had nobody else to do. ~ Francis Bacon

I never wanted to be commissioned to paint portraits. I like to choose my own subject and make a character study from it. ~ William Dobell

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature. ~ Thomas Babington Macaulay

Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist's hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed ~ Daniel Gilbert

God sends experience to paint men's portraits. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Pure photography allows us to create portraits which render their subjects with absolute truth, truth both physical and psychological. That is the principal which provided my starting point, once I had said to myself that if we can create portraits of subjects that are true, we thereby in effect create a mirror of the times in which those subjects live. ~ August Sander

That is what [Andy] Warhol portraits do: They elevate the subject into an icon of the pop culture he was documenting. ~ Giorgio Armani

But let's speak of art for a moment. Yes, art. I know a gentleman who makes excellent portraits. This gentleman is a camera. ~ Tristan Tzara

I have always loved reading, so was interested in the literary world, and took many literary portraits. ~ Fay Godwin

My portraits are half what I see and the other half is invented or dictated by the person and the painting. ~ Francesco Clemente

And painted portraits have a life of their own that comes from deep in the soul of the painter and where the machine can't go. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

I am drawn to intimate, often uncomfortable portraits of a woman persevering and awakening. ~ Vera Farmiga

I've collected Andy Warhol art for years now I have two portraits of myself done by Steve Kaufman. ~ David Caruso

...the thing about portraits is, you need to show people the way they want to be seen. And I prefer to show people as I see them. ~ Celeste Ng

When you are doing portraits, you have that intimacy with someone for a few minutes. For a really good portrait, you don't take the portrait - it's given. ~ Giles Duley

Photographers who come up with power never get accused of imitating anyone else even though they photograph the same broom, same street, same portraits. ~ Minor White

I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them. ~ Lucian Freud

I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models ... I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know ... ~ Francis Bacon

Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age. ~ Jerry Saltz

All my images are self-portraits, even when I'm not in them. ~ Nuno Roque

The principal difference between her "seductive" and her other self-portraits was the absence of self-awareness in the former and its strong presence in the latter. With time, she became brutally direct. In her later self-portraits she was no longer beautiful, merely odd-looking. She did not seduce, she simply drew attention to herself. Her face became hard, serious. The pronounced cheekbones and heavy eyebrows looks as if they had been carved out of stone. The stern black eyes looked either straight through or straight past the viewer. She deliberately exaggerated the brutality of her self-portraits. She was saying: Look at me, I'm alive and it hurts. These self-portraits were like attestations to her existence: one, two, three, four...Exhibitionism, they said. But for her, painting self-portraits was a kind of magical rite, a kind of exorcism. ~ Slavenka Drakulic

Do portraits of people in familiar and typical attitudes, above all give to their face the same choice of expression that one gives to their body. ~ Edgar Degas

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. ~ Jamie Wyeth

I'm interested in human vulnerability. We are alone, and my portraits reflect this quality. I don't want anything to get in the way of this feeling. ~ Thomas S. Buechner

When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people. ~ Richard Avedon

Painting self-portraits without clothes on has also given me some publicity. ~ Cleo Moore

Bollocks," Ryan said. "I've seen you draw. You're very good, especially at drawing portraits."

James almost laughed. He wasn't all that good at drawing portraits. He was good at drawing Ryan. ~ Alessandra Hazard

A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the theory of reincarnation. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I always take a close look at those who lose themselves in self portraits. They are solitary souls, prone to introspection, who have really grappled with their existence. ~ Young-Ha Kim

I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are. ~ Georgia O'Keeffe

Portraits are to daily faces As an evening west To a fine, pedantic sunshine In a satin vest. ~ Emily Dickinson

If one could make alive again for other people some cobwebbed skein of old dead intrigues and breathe breath and character into dead names and stiff portraits. That is history to me! ~ G. M. Trevelyan

We ... joked a little about presidential portraits. He [Bill Clinton] told me that he and Harrison Ford had been joking recently about how chins drop with age, and he didn't want to look that way. ~ Nelson Shanks

Ancient portraits are symbolic images without any immediate relation to the individuals represented; they are not portraits as we understand them ... It is remarkable that philologists who are capable of carrying accuracy to the extremes in the case of words are as credulous as babies when it comes to "images," and yet an image is so full of information that ten thousands words would not add up to it. ~ George Sarton

Yet it is something deeper that brings me unease; the true reason that portraits are so jarring. It is, of course, the possibility that we are the portraits. Perhaps we hang on their walls. In that initial instant of confrontation, we wait for the face in the wooden frame to begin moving and speaking, and to find ourselves frozen into place. ~ Talos

I feel like vocals are to music what portraits are to painting. They're the humanity. Landscapes are good and fine, but at the end of the day everyone loves the Mona Lisa. ~ Grimes

For proper family portraits it's best to stick with classic, timeless looks that will not only be beautiful now but also in 20 years, and keep the wardrobe color palette similar so it looks like the group shot was well planned. ~ George Kotsiopoulos

The Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov once said: In a Democracy, portraits of a nation's leader should never exceed the size of a postage stamp. That won't happen so quickly in Russia. ~ Vladimir Sorokin

I want to make portraits and images. I don't know how. Out of despair, I just use paint anyway. Suddenly the things you make coagulate and take on just the shape you intend. Totally accurate marks, which are outside representational marks. ~ Francis Bacon

I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth. ~ Lewis H. Lapham

I don't use names or captions for my many portraits of politicians and authors for newspapers. The drawing has to be self-explanatory, so I spend a lot of time sketching to find an idea and an angle that is clear. ~ Siegfried Woldhek

I love portraits. I've always been fascinated by the fact that when you put a frame on something you create limits for it. It makes it look dead. The same works with labels, which is a popular hobby most people have nowadays, labeling. ~ Nuno Roque

The painter who is so enamoured by the beauties of the parts of a landscape, that he strives to represent all, cannot succeed. His picture will be an arrangement of a series of portraits of things without unity ... There must be variety and contrast, but in measured doses. ~ Walter J. Phillips

If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend. ~ Heloise D'Argenteuil

Contented, unambitious people are all very well in their way. They form a neat, useful background for great portraits to be painted against, and they make a respectable, if not particularly intelligent, audience for the active spirits of the age to play before. ~ Jerome K. Jerome

If you're a guest [at my $113 million house], you'll be able to call up on screens throughout the house almost any image you like - presidential portraits, reproductions of High Renaissance paintings, pictures of sunsets, airplanes, skiers in the Andes, a rare French stamp, the Beatles in 1965. ~ Bill Gates

I feel certain that the largest part of all photographs ever taken or being taken or ever to be taken, is and will continue to be, portraits. This is not only true, it is also necessary. We are not solitary mammals, like the elephant, the whale and the ape. What is most profoundly felt between us, even if hidden, will reappear in our portraits of one another. ~ Ben Maddow

A filmmaker should never assume he's superior to his subject. I often find that even the simplest topic remains an enigma. The best film portraits not only evoke that enigma but ingest it in a process that renders what's invisible visible. ~ Damian Pettigrew

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. ~ Jamie Wyeth

My movies are film-paintings - moving portraits captured on celluloid. I'll layer that with sound to create a unique mood
like if the Mona Lisa opened her mouth, and there would be a wind, and she'd turn back and smile. It would be strange and beautiful. ~ David Lynch

Many billboards and magazine ads have resorted to showing isolated body parts rather than full-body portraits of models using or wearing products. This style of photography, known in the industry as abstract representation, allows the viewer to see himself in the advertisement, rather than the model. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting. ~ August Wilhelm Von Schlegel

I still find doing portraits a terrific challenge, but even though I've done hundreds of them, I've never stopped questioning the very nature of portraiture because it deals exclusively with appearances. I've never believed people are what they look like and think it's impossible to really know what people are. ~ Duane Michals

Potluck Supper with Meeting to Follow is a marvel, deftly examining the connections between art and everyday life. Andy Sturdevant's lively, unique inquiries into trust fund kids, co-opted flags, gubernatorial portraits, art in second-tier cities, and Upper Midwestern esoterica, brim with both wit and humor. ~ Joe Meno

It has been difficult to hold onto many paintings but I have retained a few. Possibly the current favorite is titled 'Big Band' completed in 2005. It measures 13 feet x 9 feet. It has 18 nearly life size recognizable portraits of the biggest jazz stars that I knew and saw perform in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s and includes Wynton Marsalis. ~ LeRoy Neiman

As artists, are we quasi psychiatrists who mend the soul? Do we provide the consolations, escapes, and reassurances which enable us to survive? Or are we reporters of the truth, assembling the multiple shards of reality into intricate portraits which seek out the connections between misery and blessing, violence and wisdom? Do we protect or investigate the heart? ~ Russell Sherman

Michael used to draw self-portraits with nightmares hidden in his curls. ~ Janet Fitch

Each person's work is always a portrait of himself. ~ Samuel Johnson

Even with her red-rimmed eyes she was the reason artists painted portraits. ~ Chelsey Philpot

Our cover has always been really important. For those of you who haven't seen itCharles Burns, who is a graphic artist, does four portraits, so it's split into quadrants and there's four heads, basically - portraits of people. We've actually often thought and freaked out, what if something happened to Charles Burns? Because he's so identified with the cover of our magazine, I don't know what we would do if anything happened to Charles Burns. ~ Heidi Julavits

This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so. ~ Robert Rauschenberg

If I declare it to be so, then this is a portrait. ~ Robert Rauschenberg

Many of Bonnard's later paintings are shot through with a powerful sense of morbidity. The self-portraits he painted after catching sight of himself in the various mirrors in the house - the mirror in the bathroom or the mirror in his bedroom, still lit from above by a single accusatory light bulb - are almost appallingly raw. ~ Andrew Graham-Dixon

Portraits of Gideon, Barak, Samson, ~ Preston Sprinkle

True portraits are never realistic ~ Anne McCaffrey

There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes. ~ Abraham Lincoln

But, memory paints impressionistic portraits of the past, enhancing some images and blurring others. To her, ~ Monique Martin

All we can ever know about are the portraits of each other inside our own skulls. ~ Greg Egan

And I was very successful at baby photography ... Strange isn't it? Because some of my portraits of babies were - I used dramatic lighting, shadow lighting, and I didn't use flash. We didn't have flash in those days, we just had floodlights, and I was photographing babies as I would an object - an inanimate object, for that matter. ~ Julius Shulman

I hate to paint portraits! I hope never to paint another portrait in my life. Portraiture may be all right for a man in his youth, but after forty I believe that manual dexterity deserts one, and, besides, the color-sense is less acute. Youth can better stand the exactions of a personal kind that are inseparable from portraiture. I have had enough of it. ~ John Singer Sargent

Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject. ~ Jamie Wyeth

Every record is a portrait of the band at that time. ~ Jimmy Page

The people who get their portraits painted-rich people-they want to look good. ~ Claudia Gray

Lucy paints portraits of Barbara Streisand. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

In my portraits I try to avoid the fleeting expression and vivacity of a snapshot. ~ Bill Brandt

It's funny how fast life can go by without realizing those special memories remain frozen in time like portraits on a wall. ~ Andre Gonzalez

Never be distracted by people's glamorous portraits of themselves and their lives; search and dig for what really imprisons them. ~ Robert Greene

[Before each of numerous portrait sittings:] Now then, with teeth or without? ~ Queen Elizabeth II

Life The machine The human soul A 75mm breech My portrait ~ Blaise Cendrars

In a foreign country it is far from easy to study a scene at length when you know that at any minute someone may appear and ask what you are doing and that you can't answer, and you haven't many references, and you don't know the law. Neither is it easy to find and know the subjects for portraits or comfortable to make such picture when you cannot apply an anesthesia of small talk. ~ Robert Adams

They parade for us
In zoos - in portraits
Of every generation. ~ Abigail George

[Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time. ~ Gertrude Atherton

At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer. ~ Leonard Woolf

I often paint self-portraits for it is I that know myself best-Freida Kahlo. ~ Freida Kahlo

Make people's portraits in familiar and typical attitudes. ~ Edgar Degas

Is this the main thing that painters of portraits care about? The person on the verge of becoming someone else? ~ Gregory Maguire

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

My early self-portraits appeared effortlessly and seemed like equivalents for my deeper emotions. Many critics remarked that the images had an almost other-worldly haunting presence. For me, they were simply my own reality at that point in my life. What I was trying to reveal was my inner soul in all its fragile complexity. Without knowing it, I was trying to peel back the layers that shroud and bind us all as we struggle to reveal our own authentic selves. ~ Joyce Tenneson

There is nothing to be found in human eyes, and that is their terrifying and dolorous enigma, their abominable and delusive charm. There is nothing but that which we put there ourselves. That is why honest gazes are only to be found in portraits.

The faded and weary eyes of martyrs, expressions tortured by ecstasy, imploring and suffering eyes, some resigned, others desperate... the gazes of saints, mendicants and princesses in exile, with pardoning smiles... the gazes of the possessed, the chosen and the hysterical... and sometimes of little girls, the eyes of Ophelia and Canidia, the eyes of virgins and witches... as you live in the museums, what eternal life, dolorous and intense, shines out of you! Like precious stones enshrined between the painted eyelids of masterpieces, you disturb us across time and across space, receivers of the dream which created you!

You have souls, but they are those of the artists who wished you into being, and I am delivered to despair and mortification because I have drunk the draught of poison congealed in the irises of your eyes.

The eyes of portraits ought to be plucked out. ~ Jean Lorrain

I had to stop selling stick-figure portraits of women at the beach, after too many customers complained I was making them look "too fat. ~ Jarod Kintz

The portrait of my parents is a complicated one,
but lovingly drawn. ~ Joyce Maynard