Portraits Quotes - Page 3

I think if you don't love people and aren't fascinated by them, you'll never succeed as a portrait photographer, because your pictures will look cold.

(Canada) - the most parochial nationette on earth ... I have been living in this sanctimonious icebox ... painting portraits of the opulent Methodists of Toronto. Methodism and money in this city have produced a sort of hell of dullness.

And painted portraits have a life of their own that comes from deep in the soul of the painter and where the machine can't go.

None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.

I'm at the age where I don't need an acid trip to feel naked... to feel that I don't exist. Now a self-portrait is almost a reminder to me that I do exist.

Western artists stand as humans looking at nature; Asian artists try to be in nature. You become one with nature rather than painting a portrait of it. That's a big shift.

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.

Every image is in some way a “portrait,” not in the way that it would reproduce the traits of a person, but in that it pulls and draws (this is the semantic and etymological sense of the word), in that it extracts something, an intimacy, a force.

Beauty can be seen in all things.

Every record is a portrait of the band at that time.

From the first shock of the contemplation of a face depends the principal sensation which guides me throughout the entire execution of a portrait.

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

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

The self-portrait is an act of objectifying the self and in that regard is a unique form of portraiture.

The way someone who's being photographed presents himself to the camera, and the effect of the photographer's response on that presence, is what the making of a portrait is all about.

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.

You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something - you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what Frank Stella said famously: What you see is what you see.

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.

Surely a good therapist should produce a Dorian Gray-style portrait from under the couch so the patient can see the person they really are.

I am living a new and exalted life of late. It steeps me in a sacred rapture to see a portrait develop and take soul under my hand. First, I throw off a study - just a mere study, a few apparently random lines - and to look at it you would hardly ever suspect who it was going to be; even I cannot tell, myself.

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.

What a business is this of a portrait painter! You bring him a potato and expect he will paint you a peach.

My portraits are half what I see and the other half is invented or dictated by the person and the painting.

To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.

A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.