Portraits Quotes

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.

I kept wanting to push my image as validity; I wanted to see my portrait on a wall and know it was okay.

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.

Painting self-portraits without clothes on has also given me some publicity.

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

That moment when the person actually dictates the way I do the portrait is when the intimacy arrives.

Scott Medlock's portrait of 'the shot heard around the world' from the 1935 Masters is still being celebrated as a moment in Golf History. Imagine that!

I really like doing portraits, but I like taking pictures of things that are natural, like scenery, too.

So, did I work with Warhol? I worked with him less on that play then I did on other things. He actually did a portrait of my rabbit and some other stuff. Warhol was definitely... Warhol.

It seems dangerous to be a portrait artist who does commissions for clients because everyone wants to be flattered, so they pose in such a way that there's nothing left of truth.

Your library is your portrait.

I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.

Portrait painters' mission is to portray people and the beauty of Creation. They should stay clear of ego.

An act of naming should quite rightly enable me to call any-thing a self-portrait, not only any drawing, 'portrait' or not, but everything that happens to me, that I can affect, or that affects me.

The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology.

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.

Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age.

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

The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things.

Everything in a wide sense is a kind of a self-portrait. It's just the way you see things and you're curious about certain things and just excited about them.

Of what use are pedigrees, or to be thought of noble blood, or the display of family portraits, O Ponticus?

At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer.

I love going to galleries, particularly the National Portrait Gallery.

The progression of roles you take strings together a portrait of an actor, but it's a completely random process.

We... joked a little about presidential portraits. He [Bill Clinton] told me that he and Harrison Ford had been joking recently about how chins drop with age, and he didn't want to look that way.

I love my dog. Actually, the best portrait I did was of my dog.

Pre-planning is essential. Research, research, research. If you are going to do a portrait, know as much as you can about the person beforehand. The web makes this very easy.

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'm interested in human vulnerability. We are alone, and my portraits reflect this quality. I don't want anything to get in the way of this feeling.

When I first came to America there still was Look Magazine and LIFE Magazine, and the photography in those magazines was amazing to look at. They had the best portraits, and their news photography.

So long as people expect paintings to be simply coloured photographs they get no individuality and, in the case of portraits, no characterisation.

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.

The facts of the present won't sit still for a portrait. They are constantly vibrating, full of clutter and confusion.

I think I'm predominantly known for my portraits. Obviously in my work there are landscape or stilllife elements, but mainly my work is people . . .

In the past there were too many portraits of Chairman Mao in China. They were hung everywhere. That was not proper and it didn't really show respect for Chairman Mao.

Portrait The world spreads out on either side no farther than the heart is wide.

Self-portraits are a way of revealing something about oneself.

When you do not like human beings, you cannot make good portraits.

Portraits I've done in the past I've always thought were a reflection of me.

In making portraits, I refuse to photograph myself as do so many photographers. My style is the style of the people I photograph.

Photographers who come up with power never get accused of imitating anyone else even though they photograph the same broom, same street, same portraits.

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

I found it an interesting portrait of a marriage in exploring notions of how one partner supports the other, whilst not jeopardizing the greater good - which is the family.

Bruheem kol dumuyay eloha! Blessed are all God's self-portraits.

I felt that the beach portraits were all self-portraits. That moment of unease, that attempt to find a pose, it was all about me.

Your aim as a photographer is to get a picture of that person that means something. Portraits aren't fantasies; they need to tell a truth.

The Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov once said: In a Democracy, portraits of a nation's leader should never exceed the size of a postage stamp. That won't happen so quickly in Russia.

Eloquence is a painting of thought; and thus those who, after having painted it, add something more, make a picture instead of a portrait.

If the face appears, the picture is inevitably a portrait and the expression of the face will dictate the viewer's response to the body.