Portraiture Quotes

In a sense, every work you do is a self-portrait because your paintings always reveal more about you than about your subject. Your experience of something, not the something itself, is the true underlying subject of every work you do. ~ Richard Schmid

Boswell's Johnson is the word made flesh ... an extemporaneous man talking himself into the thick of every occasion (in a world ofoccasions if nothing else) and therefore no monument at all but all that can be saved of a man alive in the pages of a book. ~ Marvin Mudrick

One can, in principle, outline sort of a set of neural circuits that are critically involved and even identify disorders that affect different components of that neural circuit and see what happens if you knock out, for example, inability to recognize faces, how it affects your response to portraiture. ~ Eric Kandel

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

I try to paint from life, but I had such a miserable experience with Bonaparte, who wouldn't sit still and kept mumbling about catching a cold and something incoherent about Wellington , so I finally decided to work from photos. ~ Roman Genn

The self-portrait is an act of objectifying the self and in that regard is a unique form of portraiture. ~ Burton Silverman

I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front. ~ Paul Cezanne

We are never content with portraits of people we know. For that reason I have always felt sorry for portrait painters. We rarely ask the impossible of anyone, but of them we do. They are required to get everybody's relationship with the subject, everybody's affection or dislike, into the picture; and not merely represent their own view of a person but what everybody else's might be too. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence. ~ William Butler Yeats

Listen: if I am a painter and I do your portrait, have I or haven't I the right to paint you as I want? ~ Oriana Fallaci

I always work directly from life, partly because I really enjoy having an interaction with the person in front of me but also because I love having a direct response to shape and color. ~ Mary Beth McKenzie

Portraiture keeps me humble. It's simple and straightforward. There is nothing more interesting I can make up than the figure sitting right in front of me. ~ Jemima Kirke

When I'm painting and drawing I only do people. Acting is obviously portraiture - and writing is as well. ~ Antony Sher

Portraiture has its risks, and I suppose a dissident Free Presbyterian fatwa is one of them. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

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

What I remember about being painted was a very severe atmosphere. I remember her intensity and sharp glance. ~ Andrew Neel

To get someone to pose, you have to be very good friends and above all speak the language. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage. ~ Jonathan Franzen

I've never taken a photograph of someone and created a persona, I've just discovered what was already there. ~ Anthony Farrimond

As an author and fellow mom, my hope is that you see yourself reflected in these pages. By sharing and reading the experiences of others, my wish is that we can move forward as a generation of women who support one another, and who can work together to create a more stable system of support for the next generation. ~ Christine Woodcock

It's really absurd to make ... a human image, with paint, today, when you think about it ... But then all of a sudden, it was even more absurd not to do it. ~ Willem De Kooning

When I paint, I seriously consider the public presence of a person - the surface facade. I am less concerned with how people look when they wake up or how they act at home. A person's public presence reflects his own efforts at image development. ~ LeRoy Neiman

I personally made a decision many years ago that I wanted to crawl into portraiture because it had a lot of latitude. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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

A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth. ~ John Singer Sargent

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. ~ Richard Avedon

Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character. ~ Charles Baudelaire

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

An artist who painted a face was now 'playing with the idea of portraiture,' or 'exploring push-pull aesthetics,' or toying with contradictions like 'menacing-slash-playful,' but he or she was never, ever, just painting a face. ~ Steve Martin

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

I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you. ~ Frida Kahlo

And best of all, as the highest portraiture of Jesus, try to forgive your enemies, as He did; and let those sublime words of your Master, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do," always ring in your ears. Forgive, as you hope to be forgiven. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

There is no self-portrait of me. ~ Gustav Klimt

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

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

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

Not every painter has a gift for painting, in fact, many painters are disappointed when they meet with difficulties in art. Painting done under pressure by artists without the necessary talent can only give rise to formlessness, as painting is a profession that requires peace of mind. The painter must always seek the essence of things, always represent the essential characteristics and emotions of the person he is painting ... ~ Titian

Every single person is unlike anyone else. Therefore, in creating a portrait of someone ... we must look carefully to catch that particular unique quality. In fact, we can neglect nothing because everything we select or do sends a message to the observer ... ~ Alton Tobey

In the years since The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, Voinovich has sharpened his satire, and Monumental Propaganda is a novel that slashes and rips
but not on every page. He expands his narrative to accommodate shrewd philosophy and inventive portraiture, a very amusing disquisition on Soviet latrines and a number of outlandish plot developments. In his translation, Andrew Bromfield deftly shifts his tone and tools as required, remaining true to Voinovich's Vonnegut-like playfulness and appreciation of the absurd. ~ Ken Kalfus

But are no other portraits necessary? Should we not be taught to see the men and women among whom we really live, - men and women such as we are ourselves, - in order that we should know what are the exact failings which oppress ourselves, and thus learn to hate, and if possible to avoid in life the faults of character which in life are hardly visible, but which in portraiture of life can be made to be so transparent. ~ Anthony Trollope

Herein lies the main objective of portraiture and also its main difficulty. The photographer probes for the innermost. The lens sees only the surface ... ~ Philippe Halsman

Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls ... if I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist. ~ Alice Neel

My work doesn't speak about individuals (it's not portraiture in the traditional sense), it tries to speak about life in general in cities of the West - which is where I live and what I understand. ~ Beat Streuli

One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person that one knows. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

All art is portraiture and all art is political: those are the things that you cannot avoid. When someone sees you in your entirety for who you are, that's the greatest act of love, because it's granting you existence. And the rarest act of love is, like cinema, to see. ~ Guillermo Del Toro

My nose isn't big. I just happen to have a very small head. ~ Jimmy Durante

The portrait painter ... If he insults his sitters his occupation is gone. Whether he paints the should instead of the features, or the latter with all its natural blemishes, he is as presumptuous as if he shouted, 'What a face. Hide it.' which would never do, although it is analogous to what landscape painters are doing every day. ~ Walter J. Phillips

When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form ... one inevitably ends up with an egg. ~ Pablo Picasso

I'm interested in how we define things by how we choose to observe them, and how everywhere in our lives, and in every moment we experience, there are forces at work that we don't fully understand. Couple this curiosity with a love of portraiture painting, and that's how this project was born. ~ Oliver Jeffers

It is in some respect greater love in Jesus to sanctify than to justify, for He maketh us most like Himself, in His own essential portraiture and image in sanctifying us. ~ Samuel Rutherford

Literature is concerned with the self-conscious exploration of the lives of men, women and children in society. Even when it is comic, it sees life as something worth talking about. This is why airport fiction, or 'blockbusters', books which are all plot, can never be considered literature, and why, in the end, they are of little value. It is not only that the language in which they are written lacks bounce and poignancy, but that they don't return the reader to the multifariousness and complication of existence… In literature personality is all, and the exploration of character – or portraiture, the human subject – is central to it. ~ Hanif Kureishi

There's no symmetry in nature. One eye is never exactly the same as the other. There's always a difference. We all have a more or less crooked nose and an irregular mouth. ~ Edouard Manet

A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face. ~ Aldous Huxley

You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait - a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich may be the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with ever modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by candlelight, when all the house is still. ~ Hope Mirrlees

Alas, it is just a single image - an extended moment perhaps. Unlike a biography, a portrait cannot present the many differing moments that make up a personality. ~ Burton Silverman

There are cells in the brain that respond to faces. This is one of the reasons that I deal with portraiture. We can learn a lot about our perception of facial expression from the behavior of these cells. ~ Eric Kandel

It is bad enough to be condemned to drag around this image in which nature has imprisoned me. Why should I consent to the perpetuation of the image of this image? ~ Plotinus

Into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, immortal longings. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother's unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture. ~ Mary McCarthy

But I was, and still am, an avid reader and so when I first started I chose to photograph many of the great writers in this country to try and earn a living. ~ Fay Godwin

If a figure doesn't look back at you, you forget it. ~ Nathan Oliveira

I don't have lots of things in the background. I do like large faces. I find them strong and contemporary. ~ Paul Emsley

I wanted to make photographs that were immediate and revealing - different from traditional portraiture that called for formal distance between artist and subject. ~ Wendy Ewald

Beware how in making the portraiture thou breakest the pattern: for divinity maketh the love of ourselves the pattern; the love of our neighbours but the portraiture. ~ John Locke