Quotes & Sayings About Portraiture

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

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

With an 'advanced' artist, it's not now possible to make a portrait. — Clement Greenberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An act of naming should quite rightly enable me to call any-thing a self-portrait, not only any drawing, 'portrait' or not, but everything that happens to me, that I can affect, or that affects me. — Jacques Derrida

The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Where some may see flat, static narratives, I see a spectrum of tonal gradations and realities. What I am creating is literally black portraiture with ballpoint pen ink. I'm looking for that in-between state in an individual where the overarching definition is lost. Skin as geography is the terrain I expand by emphasizing the specificity of blackness, where an individual's subjectivity, various realities and experiences can be drawn onto the diverse topography of the epidermis. From there, the possibilities of portraying a fully-fledged person are endless. — Toyin Odutola

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

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

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

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

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

The intersection of authoritarian politics with homoeroticism is a subject of some historical interest, from the Nazi enthusiasm for the sculptures of Josef Thorak and Arno Breker to the Italian Futurists' ritual rejection of all things feminine. That mostly petered out around the time Francisco Franco stopped rocking that fur in official portraiture, though it has made occasional ignominious appearances in Democratic politics too. But the combination of homoerotic fascination and gay panic that marks the Trump movement is truly remarkable, something unseen in American politics. It — Kevin D. Williamson

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

I want to paint men and women with that something of the external which the halo used to symbolize, and which we now seek to give by the actual radiance and vibrancy of our colorings. — Vincent Van Gogh

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

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

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

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

A form of art that I like is portraiture. I've been thinking about portraiture, and its relationship to writing and literature, biography and autobiography, and so that will be my next thing. — Robert Dessaix

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

But eventually I moved the portraiture into the smaller clay things which gave them more of a caricature look to them, rather than a characterization. — Joe Fafard

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

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

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

In terms of the class structure that you see so much in European portraiture, I don't think one feels that in America in the 21st century. But we have these other kinds of social structures now, like celebrity, who establish new hierarchies. — Will Cotton

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

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

The photographer, even in fashion and portraiture, has to have a standpoint. It's important to know what you stand for, no? Most people just take pictures, but they stand for nothing. They follow trends and don't know why. — Peter Lindbergh

I was painting her portrait in the little studio, and when I came to the eyes I stopped, overcome by emotion, and said to her, 'Have you understood me?' She nodded affirmatively. 'Will you be my wife?' I asked. She made the same affirmative sign. — Jules Breton

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

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

If my people look as if they're in a dreadful fix, it's because I can't get them out of a technical dilemma. — Francis Bacon

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

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

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

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

God often lays the sum of His amazing providences in very dismal afflictions; as the limner first puts on the dusky colors, on which he intends to draw the portraiture of some illustrious beauty. — Stephen Charnock

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

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

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

A photographic close-up is perhaps the purest form of portraiture, creating a confrontation between the viewer and the subject that daily interaction makes impossible, or at least impolite. — Martin Schoeller

I never paint a portrait from a photograph, because a photograph doesn't give enough information about what the person feels. — Francesco Clemente

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

I remember that at one time I always made a drawing before going to bed!! - Of myself I mean - though I finally destroyed most of them. — James Whistler

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 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 thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike. — Imogen Cunningham

Really good portraiture is a two-way street where someone is throwing little gems out and you're grabbing them. Very few people have a 100 percent fluency in being able to do to do this - this kind of magical reaction with a camera. — Albert Watson

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

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

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

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

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

And there's even a lord named Lord Dashwood [like the characters in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility]. It's very steeped in Austen. It's been used in many films, but not in its entirety and we shot the inside and the outside and used every nook and cranny. The inside is very gaudy. It's a little naughty inside. There's a lot of portraiture. — Jerusha Hess

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

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

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

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

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

After 20 years of painting wildlife subjects in acrylic, I felt the need for a change and began to explore portraiture and landscape in oils. — Ron Parker

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

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

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

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