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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.