Portraits Quotes - Page 5

I'm very particular who I work with. I'm not interested in portraying women with a cliched, generic look. I'm interested in a model who I can take a portrait of.

Tim Walker

Looks, Not Interested, Portraying

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An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.

W. H. Auden

Men, Self, Ego

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A city is like a family portrait - you don't tear it up if you don't like your uncle's nose.

Jaime Lerner

Uncles, Cities, Tears

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A portrait of the young Charlie Parker with a degree of vivid detail never before approached. . . [Kansas City Lightning is] a deft, virtuosic panorama of early jazz. . . This is a mind-opening, and mind-filling, book.

Tom Piazza

Book, Cities, Kansas City

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And there's a score of duchesses, surpassing womankind,
Or who have found a painter to make them so for pay
And smooth out stain and blemish with the elegance of his mind:
I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.

William Butler Yeats

Women, Phoenix, Mind

William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.127, Wordsworth Editions

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You will not get to steal quietly into heaven, into Christ's company, without a conflict and a cross. I find crosses to be Christ's carved work that he marks out for us and that with crosses he portraits us to his own image, cutting away pieces of our ill and corruption. Lord cut - Lord carve - Lord wound - Lord do anything that may perfect thy Father's image in us and make us ready for glory.

Samuel Rutherford

Father, Cutting, Perfect

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He [William Merritt Chase] is, I suspect, getting a very truthful likeness. I would like it better if [it] was not so gray, so cramped about the eyes, and not quite so corpulent. But is this not quarreling with nature?

Rutherford B. Hayes

Eye, Truthful, Appearance

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To stroll is a science, it is the gastronomy of the eye. To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live.... To stroll is to enjoy, it is to assume a mind-set, it is to admire the sublime pictures of unhappiness, of love, of joy, of graceful or grotesque portraits; it is to plunge one's vision to the depths of a thousand existences: young, it is to desire everything; old, it is to live the life of the young, to marry their passions.

Honore de Balzac

Live Life, Passion, Eye

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Dreams are like portraits; and we find they please because they are confessed resemblances.

George Crabbe

Dream, Please, Resemblance

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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 (as we have conceived it), in all its homogeneity, to one with a detail added which refuses to fit in.

Pamela Hansford Johnson

People, Details, Demand

Pamela Hansford Johnson (2012). “Night and Silence, Who is Here?”, p.117, Pan Macmillan

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Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?

Milan Kundera

Self, Long, Hatred

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One is never satisfied with a portrait of persons whom one knows. That is why I have always pitied portraitists. One demands so seldom of others the impossible, but demands just that of the portraitists.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Demand, Impossible, Satisfied

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[Before each of numerous portrait sittings:] Now then, with teeth or without?

Queen Elizabeth II

Teeth, Sitting

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Eloquence is a painting of thought; and thus those who, after having painted it, add something more, make a picture instead of a portrait.

Blaise Pascal

Thoughtful, Thinking, Add

Blaise Pascal (2009). “Thoughts”, p.21, Lulu.com

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My early self-portraits appeared effortlessly and seemed like equivalents for my deeper emotions. Many critics remarked that the images had an almost other-worldly haunting presence. For me, they were simply my own reality at that point in my life. What I was trying to reveal was my inner soul in all its fragile complexity. Without knowing it, I was trying to peel back the layers that shroud and bind us all as we struggle to reveal our own authentic selves.

Joyce Tenneson

Photography, Struggle, Reality

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A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a threadball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains on the thrower

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Eye, Men, Judging

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.142, Penguin

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Painting has always been a means of self-expression for me. Therefore, I paint because I have to and need to, not necessarily because I want to. Subconsciously or not, the figures I paint are a reflection of myself and whatever mood I am in at the time, so every painting is in essence a self-portrait.

Lori Earley

Mean, Reflection, Self

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That's what I paint, I paint people. They're portraits, but you won't always be pleased with the way you look in my paintings. Which is fine, I guess. Unless you're buying it, and it's of your kid!

Jemima Kirke

Kids, People, Looks

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

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There is no self-portrait of me.

Gustav Klimt

Self, Portraiture, Self Portrait

Gustav Klimt, Ankriktip, Abelia Serotina (2016). “Gustav Klimt Artworks”, p.46, Book and Magazine

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There's a discipline. When you take someone's portrait, you don't have to take 50 photographs, just find that one so that when you release the shutter, that's the image that you took.

Matthew Modine

Discipline, Photograph, Release

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It has been difficult to hold onto many paintings but I have retained a few. Possibly the current favorite is titled 'Big Band' completed in 2005. It measures 13 feet x 9 feet. It has 18 nearly life size recognizable portraits of the biggest jazz stars that I knew and saw perform in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s and includes Wynton Marsalis.

LeRoy Neiman

Stars, Feet, Saws

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That is what [Andy] Warhol portraits do: They elevate the subject into an icon of the pop culture he was documenting.

Giorgio Armani

Icons, Culture, Warhol

Interview Magazine Interview, www.interviewmagazine.com. December 1, 2008.

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Your aim as a photographer is to get a picture of that person that means something. Portraits aren't fantasies; they need to tell a truth.

Tim Walker

Mean, Needs, Photographer

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Get Carter remains among the great crime novels, a lean, muscular portrait of a man stumbling along the hard edge - toward redemption. Ted Lewis cuts to the bone.

James Sallis

Cutting, Men, Crime Novels

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A beautiful person among the Greeks, was thought to betray by this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods; and we can pardonpride, when a woman possesses such a figure that wherever she stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow on the wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she confers a favor on the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty, Beautiful, Wall

Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.202, Graphic Arts Books

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