Portraits Quotes

I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I have face blindness, and once a face is flattened out, I can remember it better.

All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.

Many times I see you as a portrait of torture.

The diagram of the house is a portrait of the family, a true portrait, whether it's sad or happy.

In portraits, the grace and, we may add, the likeness consists more in taking the general air than in observing the exact similitude of every feature.

You know, one of my - one of my best and, I think, most enlightening moments was when I was contacted by Michael Jackson. And he requested that I paint his portrait.

In the business of portrait photography, one must combine the artist and the craftsman.

When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.

He sat by her, watching every gesture she made, as if he would paint her portrait afterward.

'The Portrait of Dorian Grey' beautifully articulates how the altruistic part of ourselves clashes with our essentially narcissistic state.

The mirror is the tool of the one who wants to do a self-portrait. And if you want to make a photo you need a mirror.

To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.

A photographic portrait needs more collaboration between sitter and artist than a painted portrait.

My favorite books have a personality and complexion as distinctly drawn as if the author's portrait were framed into the paragraphs and smiled upon me as I read his illustrated pages.

I have a portrait of Saint Thomas More in my office.

I do mostly portraits. So it's just people's faces, not really any ideas.

There is a myth that the portrait photographer is supposed to make the subject relax, and that's the real person. But I'm interested in whatever is going on. And I'm not that comfortable myself.

Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.

A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the theory of reincarnation.

It is, indeed, only in old age that intellectual men attain their sublime expression, whilst portraits of them in their youth show only the first traces of it.

When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.

A remarkably revealing portrait.

My days are kind of controlled by my projects, so sometimes they're album covers. Sometimes they're commission portrait shoots. Sometimes they are editorial, so it kind of - I don't dictate it.

There are portraits and still-lifes And the first, because 'human' Does not excel the second

You shouldn't need 60 full minutes to create a portrait that an audience doesn't forget. You should be able to make an impression that's lasting and resonant with one scene.

A man cannot paint portraits till he has seen faces.

Even a documentary portrait of a person that tries to be very accurate is shaped by the filmmaker in so many ways.

Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed

I've collected Andy Warhol art for years now I have two portraits of myself done by Steve Kaufman.

Improvisational things about picture-making... learned from working with the small camera early on have served me well in being able to think quickly when making [portraits].

Geography is crucial for my work. I went to Antarctica and took a studio to several of the main ice fields to make field recordings of ice to create a symphony - acoustic portraits of ice.

Do portraits of people in familiar and typical attitudes, above all give to their face the same choice of expression that one gives to their body.

Make people's portraits in familiar and typical attitudes.

When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.

Who can take Death's portrait? The tyrant never sat.

I have always loved reading, so was interested in the literary world, and took many literary portraits.

I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models... I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know.

Many intelligent people, when about to write . . . , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.

Dreams are like portraits; and we find they please because they are confessed resemblances.

Satan was a blunderer ... who made a stupendous failure. If he had succeeded, we should all have been worshipping him, and his portrait would have been more flattering.

[Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.

When you are doing portraits, you have that intimacy with someone for a few minutes. For a really good portrait, you don't take the portrait - it's given.

That is what [Andy] Warhol portraits do: They elevate the subject into an icon of the pop culture he was documenting.

I feel like vocals are to music what portraits are to painting. They're the humanity. Landscapes are good and fine, but at the end of the day everyone loves the Mona Lisa.

There are a lot of period movies where they say, 'This is a portrait of Lady Whatever.' And it's done in like a 1950s or 60s style.

Jarecki's 'Reagan' is a compellingly watchable and appropriately conflicted portrait...artfully nuanced and intellectually curious.

When you do portraits professionally it's not a desire, it's for money.

Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don't know.

What I really do is make portraits of the soul.

What I do feel is that 'Up in the Air' is the most indicative film of 2009. It is the portrait of 2009.