Portraits Quotes - Page 4

When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.

In a portrait, you always leave part of yourself behind.

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.

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

A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.

The smiling portrait of you is still hanging on my frowning wall.

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.

God sends experience to paint men's portraits.

It's quite true that what I am aiming at, even when I take portraits, is to get a scandalous picture. I would love to be a paparazzo.

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.

Who would not have been laughed at if he had said in 1800 that metals could be extracted from their ores by electricity or that portraits could be drawn by chemistry.

There is nothing that special to see when looking at me.

I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody said that she does not look like it, but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.

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.

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

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.

I always take a close look at those who lose themselves in self portraits. They are solitary souls, prone to introspection, who have really grappled with their existence.

Traffic is about drugs. As detailed a portrait as I can muster about what is happening in the drug world, from top to bottom, from policy to how things move on the street.

You will never see a portrait of my love, for miracles are never seen.

A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.

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

Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

Say you are doing a portrait and the face is perfectly done, but the rest of it is done in brushstrokes. That is sort of like what might happen in the films.

Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait.

Portraits are to daily faces As an evening west To a fine, pedantic sunshine In a satin vest.