Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
All art is self-portraiture.
There is no self-portrait of me.
I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front.
If a figure doesn't look back at you, you forget it.
Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.
My nose isn't big. I just happen to have a very small head.
A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.
With an 'advanced' artist, it's not now possible to make a portrait.
I do not care to paint portraits indoors. I cannot feel sympathetic.
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.
A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.
You know, if one paints someone's portrait, one should not know him if possible.
I loathe my own face, and I've done self-portraits because I've had nobody else to do.
To get someone to pose, you have to be very good friends and above all speak the language.
Listen: if I am a painter and I do your portrait, have I or haven't I the right to paint you as I want?
Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls... if I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist.
I don't have lots of things in the background. I do like large faces, I find them strong and contemporary.
Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.
What I remember about being painted was a very severe atmosphere. I remember her intensity and sharp glance.
If my people look as if they're in a dreadful fix, it's because I can't get them out of a technical dilemma.
I never wanted to be commissioned to paint portraits. I like to choose my own subject and make a character study from it.
When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form... one inevitably ends up with an egg.
I never paint a portrait from a photograph, because a photograph doesn't give enough information about what the person feels.
What it is is a type of editorialization, you know? This is self-portraiture. This is what you think about the world we live in.
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.
Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character.
Self-portraiture is something one should never get involved in, since it is wrong to lie even though one endeavours to tell the truth.
If faces were not alike, we could not distinguish men from beasts; if they were not different, we could not tell one man from another.
Don't listen to the fools who say that pictures of people can be of no consequence, or that painting is dead. There is much to be done.
The painter must always seek the essence of things, always represent the essential characteristics and emotions of the person he is painting.
But eventually I moved the portraiture into the smaller clay things which gave them more of a caricature look to them, rather than a characterization.
Portraiture is something that we're all drawn to. I think primarily other forms - we prefer, by and large, to look at human beings than a bowl of fruit.
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.
Herein lies the main objective of portraiture and also its main difficulty. The photographer probes for the innermost. The lens sees only the surface... .
Some sitters don't engage with the process of having their portrait painted at all. They'll think it's a good opportunity to catch up with all their phone calls.
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?
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.
Beware how in making the portraiture thou breakest the pattern: for divinity maketh the love of ourselves the pattern; the love of our neighbours but the portraiture.
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.
It is in some respect greater love in Jesus to sanctify than to justify, for He maketh us most like Himself, in His own essential portraiture and image in sanctifying us.
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.
I shall praise those faces which seem to project out of the picture as though they were sculptured, and I shall censure those faces in which I see no art but that of outline.
Roger Fry is painting me. It is too like me at present, but he is confident he will be able to alter that. Post-Impressionism is at present confined to my lower lip... and to my chin.
I always work directly from life, partly because I really enjoy having an interaction with the person in front of me but also because I love having a direct response to shape and color.
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.
A photographic close-up is perhaps the purest form of portraiture, creating a confrontation between the viewer and the subject that daily interaction makes impossible, or at least impolite.
God often lays the sum of His amazing providences in very dismal afflictions; as the limner first puts on the dusky colors, on which he intends to draw the portraiture of some illustrious beauty.
My work doesn't speak about individuals (it's not portraiture in the traditional sense), it tries to speak about life in general in cities of the West - which is where I live and what I understand.
I try to paint from life, but I had such a miserable experience with Bonaparte, who wouldn't sit still and kept mumbling about catching a cold and something incoherent about Wellington , so I finally decided to work from photos.