Portraiture Quotes

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

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.

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

All art is self-portraiture.

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.

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.

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

There is no self-portrait of me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

God often lays the sum of His amazing providences in very dismal afflictions; as the limner first puts on the dusky colors, on which he intends to draw the portraiture of some illustrious beauty.