Portrait Quotes
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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.
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I wanted to become a cartoon artist, a portrait artist, and an illustrator. This was my first idea.
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'The Portrait of Dorian Grey' beautifully articulates how the altruistic part of ourselves clashes with our essentially narcissistic state.
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I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.
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You know, if one paints someone's portrait, one should not know him if possible.
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The length of exposure (one minute in sunlight) is still too long for the portrait. It was fifteen minutes when I first began my work. Progress may continue.
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I'm related to the portrait painter George Romney.
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When you're trying to paint a portrait of a very specific world, you're trying to show what makes the world different. So, sometimes it means exaggerating certain kind of aspects, but I don't think it's that important or it's that much of an issue as long as you get an emotional truth across.
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For me, an aerial picture is no different than a close-up portrait. It's a question of framing and angle. Helicopters are great for that. But I've also used planes. Of course, I always have a harness.
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In Edna, I created a satiric portrait of my hometown of Melbourne, a large provincial English city paradoxically in far Southeast Asia. She's a theatrical figure, related to vaudeville in some respects. She inhabits a world in which there are comparatively few female exponents of comedy.
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Walking down the street with a portrait of the Dalai Lama will get one immediately arrested in most parts of China. Tiny medallions are routinely confiscated and destroyed.
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We demand that people should be true to the pictures we have of them, no matter how repulsive those pictures may be: we prefer the true portrait in all its homogeneity, to one with a detail added which refuses to fit in.
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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.
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The portrait I do best is of the person I know best.
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I first thought about doing a project about Anna Wintour and 'Vogue' when I read an article in 'New York Magazine' about the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute Ball, the annual fundraising gala that Anna oversees. It created such a fascinating portrait that I couldn't help but be compelled.
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I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.
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I was good friends with Frank Sinatra, I heard Steve Kaufman painting his portrait, so I asked Steve to paint my portrait.
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I will never, for the future, paint the portrait of a tyrant until his head lies before me on the scaffold.
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That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.
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I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!
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At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer.
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A good portrait is incredibly hard to create, there is too much temptation to pander to the individual rather than portray them as they really were.
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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.
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A photographic portrait needs more collaboration between sitter and artist than a painted portrait.
