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Portraiture Quotes

1.
A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.
John Singer Sargent

Authors on Portraiture Quotes: Kehinde Wiley Jamie Wyeth Francis Bacon Martin Schoeller Nathan Oliveira Andrew Neel Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Oliver Jeffers Charles Baudelaire Vincent Van Gogh Plotinus Francesco Clemente August Wilhelm von Schlegel Pablo Picasso John Locke Oriana Fallaci Clement Greenberg Jerusha Hess Samuel Rutherford Pierre-Auguste Renoir Walter J. Phillips E. M. Forster John Singer Sargent Imogen Cunningham Burton Silverman Jimmy Durante Titian Edouard Manet Willem de Kooning Paul Cezanne Michel de Montaigne Ingmar Bergman Aldous Huxley
2.
Faces are the most interesting things we see; other people fascinate me, and the most interesting aspect of other people - the point where we go inside them - is the face. It tells all.
David Hockney

3.
My nose isn't big. I just happen to have a very small head.
Jimmy Durante

4.
All art is self-portraiture.
Kehinde Wiley

5.
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

6.
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.
Kehinde Wiley

7.
The painter must always seek the essence of things, always represent the essential characteristics and emotions of the person he is painting.
Titian

8.
There is no self-portrait of me.
Gustav Klimt

9.
One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person that one knows.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

10.
The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.
Imogen Cunningham

11.
I loathe my own face, and I've done self-portraits because I've had nobody else to do.
Francis Bacon

12.
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

13.
With an 'advanced' artist, it's not now possible to make a portrait.
Clement Greenberg

14.
Self-portraiture is something one should never get involved in, since it is wrong to lie even though one endeavours to tell the truth.
Ingmar Bergman

15.
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

16.
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

17.
Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls... if I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist.
Alice Neel

18.
I never paint a portrait from a photograph, because a photograph doesn't give enough information about what the person feels.
Francesco Clemente

19.
Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character.
Charles Baudelaire

20.
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

21.
When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form... one inevitably ends up with an egg.
Pablo Picasso

22.
Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.
Jamie Wyeth

23.
To get someone to pose, you have to be very good friends and above all speak the language.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir

24.
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

25.
I don't have lots of things in the background. I do like large faces, I find them strong and contemporary.
Paul Emsley

26.
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.
R. B. Kitaj

27.
If a figure doesn't look back at you, you forget it.
Nathan Oliveira

28.
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

29.
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

30.
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

31.
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.
E. M. Forster

32.
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

33.
I shall praise those faces which seem to project out of the picture as though they were sculptured, and I shall censure those faces in which I see no art but that of outline.
Leon Battista Alberti

34.
If faces were not alike, we could not distinguish men from beasts; if they were not different, we could not tell one man from another.
Michel de Montaigne

35.
I do not care to paint portraits indoors. I cannot feel sympathetic.
Joaquin Sorolla

36.
A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.
Aldous Huxley

37.
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

38.
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

39.
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

40.
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

41.
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

42.
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

43.
Ah! Portraiture,
portraiture with the thought,
the soul of the model in it,
that is what I think must come.
Vincent Van Gogh

44.
I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front.
Paul Cezanne

45.
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

46.
You know, if one paints someone's portrait, one should not know him if possible.
Otto Dix

47.
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.
Kehinde Wiley

48.
What I remember about being painted was a very severe atmosphere. I remember her intensity and sharp glance.
Andrew Neel

49.
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

50.
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