Self Portraits Quotes & Sayings

My work has been about making a record of my life that no one can revise. I photograph myself in times of trouble or change in order to find the ground to stand on in the change. I was coming out of a melancholic phase. This was taken when I was traveling extensively, on the road from hotel to hotel. You get displaced, and then taking self-portraits becomes a way of hanging on to yourself. — Nan Goldin

Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self? — Milan Kundera

We all stood and gathered our backpacks and I looked at the floor around my chair to make sure I hadn't dropped anything. I was terrified of unwittingly leaving behind a scrap of paper on which were written all my private desires and humiliations. The fact that no such scrap of paper existed, that I did not even keep a diary or write letters except bland, earnest, falsely cheerful ones to my family (We lost to St. Francis in soccer, but I think we'll win our game this Saturday; we are working on self-portraits in art class, and the hardest part for me is the nose) never decreased my fear. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Yeah, they did. Didn't you notice they changed the theme of the New Year Art Show? In past years fifth graders painted self-portraits, but this year they made us do those ridiculous self-portraits as animals, remember?" "So big freakin' deal." "I know! I'm not saying I agree, I'm just saying that's what she's saying." "I know, I know. This is just so messed up. — R.J. Palacio

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

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

Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along the mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself. — N.D. Wilson

I have always loved the amateur side of photography, automatic photographs, accidental photographs with uncentered compositions, heads cut off, whatever. I incite people to make their self-portraits. I see myself as their walking photo booth. — William Klein

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

The humor for me is how far above your head the signature is - it's dislocated from the sign of the artist in such a distinct way that it could almost be a self-portrait of a sort. — Laura Owens

When I look in the mirror, I am slightly reminded of self-portraits by Durer and by Rembrandt, because they both show a degree of introspection. I see some element of disappointment; I see a sense of humour, but also something that is faintly ridiculous; and I see somebody who is frightened of being found out and thought lightweight. — Robert Winston

All photographs are self-portraits. — Minor White

Taking photographs is generally an act of 'looking at the object, whereas 'being seen' or 'showing' is what is most interest to one who does a self-portrait ... self-portraits deny not only photography itself but the 20th century as an era as well ... an inevitable phenomenon at the end of the 20th century. — Yasumasa Morimura

Rarely has a man been more comfortable with his own greatness. He spent much of his leisure time penning long and flattering portraits of himself, declaring that there had never 'been a greater botanist or zoologist', and that his system of classification was 'the greatest achievement in the realm of science'. Modestly, he suggested that his gravestone should bear the inscription Princeps Botanicorum, 'Prince of Botanists'. It was never wise to question his generous self-assessments. Those who did so were apt to find they had weeds named after them. — Bill Bryson

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

I do not care about my own appearance, but I would hope that people could see into my soul, and that is presented better in these photographs than in others. (On his self-portraits) — August Strindberg

There are certain things - How to say this? OK. Let me give you an example. Can I give you an example? There's a self-portrait by Rembrandt. It's at Kenwood House, very close to where we live. It's one of my favorite paintings. I go to see it quite a lot. I start off on a walk on the Heath, and then I find myself there. It's one of the last self-portraits he did. He painted it sometime between 1665 and when he died four years later, bankrupt and alone. Whole stretches of the canvas are bare. There's a hurried intensity in the strokes - you can see where he scratched into the wet paint with the end of the brush. It's as if he knew there wasn't much time left. And yet, there's a serenity in his face, a sense of something that's survived its own ruin.
Fran couldn't give two shits about that painting. — Nicole Krauss

I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear. — Cindy Sherman

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

Everyone thinks these are self-portraits but they aren't meant to be. I just use myself as a model because I know I can push myself to extremes, make each shot as ugly or goofy or silly as possible. — Cindy Sherman

Great works of art in all cultures succeed in capturing within the constraints of their form both the pathos of anguish and a vision of its resolution. Take, for example, the languorous sentences of Proust or the haiku of Basho, the late quartets and sonatas of Beethoven, the tragicomic brushwork of Sengai or the daunting canvases of Rothko, the luminous self-portraits of Rembrandt and Hakuin. Such works achieve their resolution not through consoling or romantic images whereby anguish is transcended. They accept anguish without being overwhelmed by it. They reveal anguish as that which gives beauty its dignity and depth. — Stephen Batchelor

Self-portraits are a way of revealing something about oneself. — Eric Kandel

It has often been said that during the period of liberal Protestantism, when innumerable "lives of Jesus" were written, designed to help educated middle-class Europeans and Americans to respond to the gospel, the portraits that resulted were very obviously self-portraits. They told you more about the writer than about Jesus. — Lesslie Newbigin

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

Up the stairs I found an imposing headquarters, decorated with the portraits and busts of solemn, whiskered old darlings who, no doubt, bled their customers with leeches and passed on the information to alarmed small boys that self-abuse leads to blindness. — John Mortimer

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best. — Frida Kahlo

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

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

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

There was a picture of the family over the mantelpiece, removed thither from the front room after Mrs. Osborne's death - George was on a pony, the elder sister holding him up a bunch of flowers; the younger led by her mother's hand; all with red cheeks and large red mouths, simpering on each other in the approved family-portrait manner. The mother lay underground now, long since forgotten - the sisters and brother had a hundred different interests of their own, and, familiar still, were utterly estranged from each other. Some few score of years afterwards, when all the parties represented are grown old, what bitter satire there is in those flaunting childish family-portraits, with their farce of sentiment and smiling lies, and innocence so self-conscious and self-satisfied. Osborne's — William Makepeace Thackeray

Everything in a wide sense is a kind of a self-portrait. It's just the way you see things and you're curious about certain things and just excited about them. — Jurgen Teller

Bruheem kol dumuyay eloha! Blessed are all God's self-portraits. — Richard Zimler

I find it really fascinating that while in an attempt to look beautiful we tend to go for what's easily acceptable.
But when it comes to portraits, it is only our facial flaws that make that picture worth its while, setting it apart.
Isn't it amazing to find that beauty is something that makes us alike? While our flaws are the real contributors to our uniqueness. — Mansi Laus Deo

We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, — N.D. Wilson

All we are doing are self-portraits. As simple that. We accumulate knowledge and wisdom and power, and we get our hearts broken, and we write. We write for others to absorb what took us so long to understand. — Cristian Mihai

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

Oh Beck, I love reading your e-mail. Learning your life. And I am careful; I always mark new messages unread so that you won't get alarmed. My good fortune doesn't stop there; You prefer e-mail. You don't like texting. So this means that I am not missing out on all that much communication. You wrote an "essay" for some blog in which you stated that "e-mails last forever. You can search for any word at any time and see everything you ever said to anyone about that one word. Texts go away." I love you for wanting a record. I love your records for being so accessible and I'm so full of you, your calendar of caloric intake and hookups and menstrual moments, your self-portraits you don't publish, your recipes and exercises. You will know me soon too, I promise. — Caroline Kepnes

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