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.
I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front.
A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.
I hate to paint portraits! I hope never to paint another portrait in my life. Portraiture may be all right for a man in his youth, but after forty I believe that manual dexterity deserts one, and, besides, the color-sense is less acute. Youth can better stand the exactions of a personal kind that are inseparable from portraiture. I have had enough of it.
I never paint a portrait from a photograph, because a photograph doesn't give enough information about what the person feels.
To get someone to pose, you have to be very good friends and above all speak the language.
A good form strikes all eyes pleasantly, long before they have any science on the subject; and a beautiful face sets twenty hearts in palpitation, prior to all consideration of the mechanical proportions of the features and head.
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.
When I paint a portrait I want to know more than just the looks of the person. I want to know how they live and what their feelings are... It then becomes more than just physiognomy, but the feel of the person.
The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.
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.
I was painting her portrait in the little studio, and when I came to the eyes I stopped, overcome by emotion, and said to her, 'Have you understood me?' She nodded affirmatively. 'Will you be my wife?' I asked. She made the same affirmative sign.
We... joked a little about presidential portraits. He [Bill Clinton] told me that he and Harrison Ford had been joking recently about how chins drop with age, and he didn't want to look that way.
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?
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.
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.
The area between the nose and the chin, the subject of kissing and the vehicle for speech, is perhaps even more known and set upon than the eyes. The mouth is also riddled with a complex interweaving of folds, curves, flats and lost-and-found edges. These nuances are needed by a perceptive person who might try to understand human nature.
Really good portraiture is a two-way street where someone is throwing little gems out and you're grabbing them. Very few people have a 100 percent fluency in being able to do to do this - this kind of magical reaction with a camera.
Herein lies the main objective of portraiture and also its main difficulty. The photographer probes for the innermost. The lens sees only the surface... .
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.
All art is self-portraiture.
We're wired to be empathetic and to care about the needs of others, but also to be curious about others. And I think that's just sort of in our DNA. And so portraiture is a very human act.
Going to the Huntington gardens and libraries was radically important for me. They have one of the best collections of 18th- and 19th-century British portraiture that you can imagine in Southern California. One doesn't think about Southern California as being the capital of great art.
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 wanted to make photographs that were immediate and revealing - different from traditional portraiture that called for formal distance between artist and subject.
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