Portraits famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.
-- Alain de Botton -
The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.
-- Aldo Leopold -
To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.
-- Alexander Smith -
A photographic portrait needs more collaboration between sitter and artist than a painted portrait.
-- Alvin Langdon Coburn -
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.
-- Amos Bronson Alcott -
Jeanne, I fell asleep among the paintings, where I could sit for many days worshipping your portrait. I fell in love with your portrait, Jeanne, because it will never change. I have such a fear of seeing you grow old, Jeanne, I fell in love with an unchanging you that will never be taken away from me. I was wishing you would die, so that no one could take you away from me, and I would love the painting of you as you would look eternally.
-- Anais Nin -
The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
-- Anatole Broyard -
We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us
-- Andre Gide -
I have a portrait of Saint Thomas More in my office.
-- Andrew Cuomo -
When I did my self-portrait, I left all the pimples out because you always should. Pimples are a temporary condition and they don't have anything to do with what you really look like. Always omit the blemishes-they're not part of the good picture you want.
-- Andy Warhol -
In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.
-- Annie Leibovitz -
My early childhood equipped me really well for my portrait work: The quick encounter, where you are not going to know the subject for very long. These days I am much more comfortable with the fifteen minute relationship, than I am with a life long relationship.
-- Annie Leibovitz -
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 -
In front of the model I work with the same will to reproduce truth as if I were making a portrait. I do not correct nature, I incorporate myself into it; it directs me. I can only work with a model. The sight of human forms nourishes and comforts me.
-- Auguste Rodin -
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.
-- Berenice Abbott -
Andre Breton once said that a portrait should not only be an image but an oracle one questions, and that the photographer's aim should be a profound likeness, which physically and morally predicts the subject's entire future.
-- Bill Brandt -
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.
-- Billy Joel -
Life The machine The human soul A 75mm breech My portrait
-- Blaise Cendrars -
Eloquence is a painting of thought; and thus those who, after having painted it, add something more, make a picture instead of a portrait.
-- Blaise Pascal -
Cristina Eisenberg weaves her observations as a scientist and her personal experiences afield into a resonant account about the web of life that links humans to the natural world. Grounded in best science, inspired by her intimate knowledge of the wolves she studies, she offers us a luminous portrait of the ecological relationships that are essential for our well-being in a rapidly changing world. The Wolf's Tooth calls for a conservation vision that involves rewilding the earth and honoring all our relations.
-- Brenda Peterson -
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 -
The self-portrait is an act of objectifying the self and in that regard is a unique form of portraiture.
-- Burton Silverman -
What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
A man cannot paint portraits till he has seen faces.
-- Christian Nestell Bovee -
Neurologically, I'm a quadriplegic, so virtually everything about my work has been driven by my learning disabilities, which are quite severe, and my lack of facial recognition, which I'm sure is what drove me to paint portraits in the first place.
-- Chuck Close -
I wanted to translate from one flat surface to another.In fact, my learning disabilities controlled a lot of things. I don't recognize faces, so I'm sure it's what drove me to portraits in the first place.
-- Chuck Close -
I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.
-- Cindy Sherman -
With an 'advanced' artist, it's not now possible to make a portrait.
-- Clement Greenberg -
Painting self-portraits without clothes on has also given me some publicity.
-- Cleo Moore -
A filmmaker should never assume he's superior to his subject. I often find that even the simplest topic remains an enigma. The best film portraits not only evoke that enigma but ingest it in a process that renders what's invisible visible.
-- Damian Pettigrew -
My paintings are loosely based on meta narratives. The pictures float in and out of pictorial genres. Still life's become personified, portraits become events, and landscapes become constructions. I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive.
-- Dana Schutz -
Franz Kline, who became known for his black and white paintings, did a whole series of gorgeous landscapes and wonderful portraits that may still hang in Greenwich Village.
-- David Amram -
Sometimes, in a portrait, I go straight in with paint onto canvas... Other than riding my bike up and down the hills around here, it is the most dangerous thing I do... like tightrope-walking without a safety net!
-- David Cobley -
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.
-- David Hockney -
It is done... the precious portrait placed in the hands of the gentlemen for safe keeping.
-- Dolley Madison -
I took my portrait that Kaufman did of me home from the Saturday Night Live TV set.
-- Eddie Murphy -
A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.
-- Edvard Munch -
When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.
-- Edvard Munch -
A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.
-- Edward Steichen -
Portrait The world spreads out on either side no farther than the heart is wide.
-- Emily Dickinson -
Your dreams are the product of your longings, a portrait of your potential, and a promise of your future.
-- Erwin McManus -
I have always loved reading, so was interested in the literary world, and took many literary portraits.
-- Fay Godwin -
I never paint a portrait from a photograph, because a photograph doesn't give enough information about what the person feels.
-- Francesco Clemente -
My portraits are half what I see and the other half is invented or dictated by the person and the painting.
-- Francesco Clemente -
That moment when the person actually dictates the way I do the portrait is when the intimacy arrives.
-- Francesco Clemente -
The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.
-- Georg C. Lichtenberg -
Dreams are like portraits; and we find they please because they are confessed resemblances.
-- George Crabbe -
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.
-- George Eliot -
Ancient portraits are symbolic images without any immediate relation to the individuals represented; they are not portraits as we understand them. ...It is remarkable that philologists who are capable of carrying accuracy to the extremes in the case of words are as credulous as babies when it comes to "images," and yet an image is so full of information that ten thousands words would not add up to it.
-- George Sarton -
I really like doing portraits, but I like taking pictures of things that are natural, like scenery, too.
-- Georgia May Jagger -
[Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.
-- Gertrude Atherton -
I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
-- Gertrude Stein -
What a business is this of a portrait painter! You bring him a potato and expect he will paint you a peach.
-- Gilbert Stuart -
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.
-- Grimes -
There is nothing that special to see when looking at me. I'm a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening - figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits.
-- Gustav Klimt -
Jarecki's 'Reagan' is a compellingly watchable and appropriately conflicted portrait...artfully nuanced and intellectually curious.
-- Hank Stuever -
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.
-- Harvey Fierstein -
My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.
-- Helmut Newton -
In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson -
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.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson -
God sends experience to paint men's portraits.
-- Henry Ward Beecher -
I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.
-- Howard Hodgkin -
Portrait painters' mission is to portray people and the beauty of Creation. They should stay clear of ego...
-- Igor Babailov -
None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.
-- Imogen Cunningham -
So many people dislike themselves so thoroughly that they never see any reproduction of themselves that suits. None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.
-- Imogen Cunningham -
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.
-- Imogen Cunningham -
When you do portraits professionally it's not a desire, it's for money.
-- Imogen Cunningham -
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.
-- Jacob Epstein -
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.
-- Jacques Derrida -
A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, “I don’t look like that.†And Picasso replied, “You will.†And he was right.
-- James A. Baldwin -
Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas. Paint is a cast made of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's body and thoughts.
-- James Elkins -
Get Carter remains among the great crime novels, a lean, muscular portrait of a man stumbling along the hard edge - toward redemption. Ted Lewis cuts to the bone.
-- James Sallis -
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 -
When I paint a portrait I want to know more than just the looks of the person. I want to know how they live and what their feelings are... It then becomes more than just physiognomy, but the feel of the person.
-- Jamie Wyeth -
Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.
-- Jamie Wyeth -
The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology.
-- Jamie Wyeth -
What I do feel is that 'Up in the Air' is the most indicative film of 2009. It is the portrait of 2009.
-- Jason Reitman -
You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.
-- Jawaharlal Nehru -
In all that surrounds him the egotist sees only the frame of his own portrait.
-- Jean Antoine Petit-Senn -
Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre -
That's what I paint, I paint people. They're portraits, but you won't always be pleased with the way you look in my paintings. Which is fine, I guess. Unless you're buying it, and it's of your kid!
-- Jemima Kirke -
Every record is a portrait of the band at that time.
-- Jimmy Page -
I do not care to paint portraits indoors. I cannot feel sympathetic.
-- Joaquin Sorolla -
One of the things I learned on the street was to trust life and to keep hands off of it, and that feeling continues in the rest of the works that I do, the portrait, the landscapes, or any interest that I have. Things are good enough as they are, there's no reason to tamper with them.
-- Joel Meyerowitz -
A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.
-- John Singer Sargent -
A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth.
-- John Singer Sargent -
A letter is the portrait of the soul ...
-- Josephine de Beauharnais -
The portrait of my parents is a complicated one, but lovingly drawn.
-- Joyce Maynard -
Through a portrait, we can potentially see everything — the history and depth of a person's life, as well as evidence of a primal universal presence. I have dedicated my life and creative energy to capturing these transcendent moments in which a connection is made between the subject, the photographer, and the viewer.
-- Joyce Tenneson -
I wasn‘t—" I began. I didn‘t—" He began. How charming," V‘lane cut us off. His voice arrived before he did. "The very portrait of human domestic bliss. She‘s on the floor, you‘re towering over her. Did he strike you, MacKayla? Say the word and I‘ll kill him.
-- Karen Marie Moning -
I was good friends with Frank Sinatra, I heard Steve Kaufman painting his portrait, so I asked Steve to paint my portrait.
-- Lee Iacocca -
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.
-- Leos Carax -
It has been difficult to hold onto many paintings but I have retained a few. Possibly the current favorite is titled 'Big Band' completed in 2005. It measures 13 feet x 9 feet. It has 18 nearly life size recognizable portraits of the biggest jazz stars that I knew and saw perform in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s and includes Wynton Marsalis.
-- LeRoy Neiman -
I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them.
-- Lucian Freud -
I want paint to work as flesh... my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them ... As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does.
-- Lucian Freud -
Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.
-- Lucian Freud
