Portraiture Quotes

We have a lot of sort of received historical ways of viewing portraiture. And I suppose in some way I'm sort of questioning that by toying with the rules of the game.

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.

What it is is a type of editorialization, you know? This is self-portraiture. This is what you think about the world we live in.

Don't listen to the fools who say that pictures of people can be of no consequence, or that painting is dead. There is much to be done.

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

A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.

my sitters get tired waiting for commissioned portraits. If they commission me they have to wait years sometimes because I discard so many.

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

Make portraits of people in typical, familiar poses, being sure above all to give their faces the same kind of expression as their bodies.

Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.

There is no self-portrait of me.

One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person that one knows.

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

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

You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.

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

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

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?

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.

To get someone to pose, you have to be very good friends and above all speak the language.

I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front.

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

The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.

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.

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.

I am living a new and exalted life of late. It steeps me in a sacred rapture to see a portrait develop and take soul under my hand. First, I throw off a study - just a mere study, a few apparently random lines - and to look at it you would hardly ever suspect who it was going to be; even I cannot tell, myself.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The area between the nose and the chin, the subject of kissing and the vehicle for speech, is perhaps even more known and set upon than the eyes. The mouth is also riddled with a complex interweaving of folds, curves, flats and lost-and-found edges. These nuances are needed by a perceptive person who might try to understand human nature.

The painter must always seek the essence of things, always represent the essential characteristics and emotions of the person he is painting.

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.

The real artist is striving to depict his subject's character and to stress the caricature, but at least it is art which is alive.

We're wired to be empathetic and to care about the needs of others, but also to be curious about others. And I think that's just sort of in our DNA. And so portraiture is a very human act.

It is for the artist... in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.

Portraiture is something that we're all drawn to. I think primarily other forms - we prefer, by and large, to look at human beings than a bowl of fruit.

... 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.

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.

A good form strikes all eyes pleasantly, long before they have any science on the subject; and a beautiful face sets twenty hearts in palpitation, prior to all consideration of the mechanical proportions of the features and head.

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.

I had no aspirations to become a landscape photographer at all. In fact it was portraiture that was my beginning, I suppose. I have always been a very keen walker, though, and I often took a camera with me on my walks. 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.

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

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.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

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.

Roger Fry is painting me. It is too like me at present, but he is confident he will be able to alter that. Post-Impressionism is at present confined to my lower lip... and to my chin.