Portraits Quotes
I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
The way someone who's being photographed presents himself to the camera, and the effect of the photographer's response on that presence, is what the making of a portrait is all about.
And then I went round the corner and there's a Van Gogh portrait, and you just think, well, this is another level. A higher level, actually. I love the Sargent, but it's not the level of Van Gogh.
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.
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)
To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.
My portraits are half what I see and the other half is invented or dictated by the person and the painting.
The self-portrait is an act of objectifying the self and in that regard is a unique form of portraiture.
What a business is this of a portrait painter! You bring him a potato and expect he will paint you a peach.
A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.
I never paint a portrait from a photograph, because a photograph doesn't give enough information about what the person feels.
Self-portraits have been done in painting, but never in music or literature. It has no meaning, it makes no sense. And in movies I was wondering if it could. And how.
Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character.
Who would not have been laughed at if he had said in 1800 that metals could be extracted from their ores by electricity or that portraits could be drawn by chemistry.
The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective.
It's quite true that what I am aiming at, even when I take portraits, is to get a scandalous picture. I would love to be a paparazzo.
I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody said that she does not look like it, but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.
I didn't try and do fashion pictures. I tried to do portraits of girls wearing dresses.
Traffic is about drugs. As detailed a portrait as I can muster about what is happening in the drug world, from top to bottom, from policy to how things move on the street.
Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.
Portraits are to daily faces As an evening west To a fine, pedantic sunshine In a satin vest.
The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.
Say you are doing a portrait and the face is perfectly done, but the rest of it is done in brushstrokes. That is sort of like what might happen in the films.
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.
When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form... one inevitably ends up with an egg.
A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.
I thank Henry James for the scene in the hotel room, that I stole from Portrait Of A Lady… This particular scene is the most beautiful scene ever written.
I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.
In all that surrounds him the egotist sees only the frame of his own portrait.
With the daguerreotype, everyone will be able to have their portrait taken . . . and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same.
When you start with a portrait and try to find pure form by abstracting more and more, you must end up with an egg.
The portrait is the subject matter in photography where the problems of the media are the most visible.
What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.
I kept wanting to push my image as validity; I wanted to see my portrait on a wall and know it was okay.
I'm that person who owns all of the seasons on DVDs, including the Lifetime intimate portraits showcasing The Golden Girls. I am a massive fan. I think I'm Dorothy. She's my favorite.
The artist who imagines that he puts his best into a portrait in order to produce something good, which will be a pleasure to the sitter and to himself, will have some bitter experiences.
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!
I'm very particular who I work with. I'm not interested in portraying women with a cliched, generic look. I'm interested in a model who I can take a portrait of.
We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.