Portraits Quotes - Page 14

• The self-portrait is an act of objectifying the self and in that regard is a unique form of portraiture.

  Burton Silverman

  Unique, Self, Portraiture

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• 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.

  Burton Silverman

  Personality, Portraiture, Biographies

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• I thought, 'Well, I'll amuse people a little bit.' During lunch hour, while everyone was off to the faculty club and this and that, I set up a bunch of bases down the hallway of the school and I put all of the portraits I had completed... and I waited for the reaction.... that's how I got started again, doing portraits of people around me.

  Joe Fafard

  Fun, School, Lunch

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• A photographic portrait needs more collaboration between sitter and artist than a painted portrait.

  Alvin Langdon Coburn

  Artist, Collaboration, Needs

  Alvin Langdon Coburn, Alison Gernsheim (1978). “Alvin Langdon Coburn, Photographer: An Autobiography with Over 70 Reproductions of His Works”, p.24, Courier Corporation

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• More than any other contemporary British playwright, Tom Stoppard populates his plays -- from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to The Invention of Love (his portrait of the poet and scholar A. E. Housman) -- with characters from life and literature. But one cannot always tell the difference between those who are real and those who are imaginary.

  Mel Gussow

  Real, Character, Play

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• 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.

  James Elkins

  Records, Movement, Body

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.5, Routledge

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• Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih, is an eloquent and restrained portrait of one man's exile. It is a rare narrative in that it charts a life divided between England and Sudan. Without a doubt it is one of the finest Arabic novels of the 20th century, and Denys Johnson-Davies' translationdoes the original justice.

  Hisham Matar

  Men, Justice, Doubt

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• The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology.

  Jamie Wyeth

  Danger, Methodology, Painter

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• When painting portraits a lot of people say, 'Why not get a photograph of the person?' Photography is wonderful and it is an art form in itself, but... my portrait is a culmination of elements... a truer image of a person than just the 'click' of a snapshot.

  Jamie Wyeth

  Photography, Art, People

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• Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.

  Jamie Wyeth

  Portraiture, Paint, Subjects

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• A vivid portrait of a teenage girl and her family in disarray. Meredith is a wonderful narrator, witty, feisty, full of yearning, and the story she tells is as complicated as life itself. This is a richly satisfying novel.

  Margot Livesey

  Girl, Witty, Teenage

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• 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.

  Jamie Wyeth

  Feelings, Looks, Portraiture

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• 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.

  Jamie Wyeth

  Portraiture, Faces, Painting

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• So long as people expect paintings to be simply coloured photographs they get no individuality and, in the case of portraits, no characterisation.

  William Dobell

  Long, People, Individuality

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• You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.

  Jawaharlal Nehru

  Wall, History, Faces

  Jawaharlal Nehru's statement to Nikita Khrushchev as quoted in The New York Post, April 1, 1959.

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• I like A&E. I like those corny intimate-portrait things. They're so kind of ingenious and artificial and soothing.

  Mary-Louise Parker

  Kind, Corny, Intimate

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• Many intelligent people, when about to write . . . , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Writing, Intelligent, People

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• People don't have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography.

  Robert Mapplethorpe

  Photography, People, Waiting

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Photography, Echoes, People

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• If it's a likeness, alone, it's not a success. If, through my portraits, you can come to know the subjects more meaningfully, if it synthesizes your feelings toward someone whose work has imprinted itself on your mind--if you see a photograph and say, 'Yes, this is the person,' with a little new insight--that is a beautiful experience.

  Yousuf Karsh

  Beautiful, Photography, Feelings

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• When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.

  Richard Avedon

  Photography, People, Alive

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• A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks. He's implicated in what's happening, and he has a certain real power over the result.

  Richard Avedon

  Photography, Real, Doe

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• In a foreign country it is far from easy to study a scene at length when you know that at any minute someone may appear and ask what you are doing and that you can't answer, and you haven't many references, and you don't know the law. Neither is it easy to find and know the subjects for portraits or comfortable to make such picture when you cannot apply an anesthesia of small talk.

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Country, Law

  Robert Adams, Maren Stange (1990). “Paul Strand: essays on his life and work”

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• According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.

  Alain de Botton

  Love, Men, Body

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• It is not merely the likeness which is precious... but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing... the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think - and it is not at all monstrous in me to say that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist's work ever produced.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Love, Photography, Lying

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1954). “Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford: the unpublished letters of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford”

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