Portraits Quotes - Page 7

• 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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• 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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• 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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• my sitters get tired waiting for commissioned portraits. If they commission me they have to wait years sometimes because I discard so many.

  William Dobell

  Tired, Years, Waiting

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• I don't use names or captions for my many portraits of politicians and authors for newspapers. The drawing has to be self-explanatory, so I spend a lot of time sketching to find an idea and an angle that is clear.

  Siegfried Woldhek

  Names, Ideas, Drawing

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• [Raphael's] great superiority is due to the instinctive sense which, in him, seems to desire to shatter form. Form is, in his figures, what it is in ourselves, an interpreter for the communication of ideas and sensations, an exhaustless source of poetic inspiration. Every figure is a world in itself, a portrait of which the original appeared in a sublime vision, in a flood of light, pointed to by an inward voice, laid bare by a divine finger which showed what the sources of expression had been in the whole past life of the subject.

  Honore de Balzac

  Inspiration, Communication, Past

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• The longing of my heart is a fairy portrait of myself: I want to be pretty; I want to eliminate facts and fill up the gap with charms.

  Mark Twain

  Heart, Want, Gaps

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• Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions." "I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.

  Oscar Wilde

  Beautiful, Running, Art

  Oscar Wilde (2013). “The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Story of a Fashionable Young Man Who Sells His Soul for Eternal Youth and Beauty (Beloved Books Edition)”, p.17, Lulu Press, Inc

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• The portrait of my parents is a complicated one, but lovingly drawn.

  Joyce Maynard

  Parent, Complicated

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• Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don't know.

  Imogen Cunningham

  Nice, Doe, Stories

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• My waking thoughts are all of thee. Your portrait and the remembrance of last night's delirium have robbed my senses of repose. Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what an extraordinary influence you have over my heart. Are you vexed? Do I see you sad? Are you ill at ease? My soul is broken with grief, and there is no rest for your lover.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Sweet, Grief, Heart

  "Napoleon's Letters to Josephine 1796-1812" edited by Henry Foljambe Hall, 1901.

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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• I never wanted to be commissioned to paint portraits. I like to choose my own subject and make a character study from it.

  William Dobell

  Character, Portraiture, Study

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• Satan was a blunderer ... who made a stupendous failure. If he had succeeded, we should all have been worshipping him, and his portrait would have been more flattering.

  George Eliot

  Satan, Made, Should

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.1550, Delphi Classics

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• Portraits are to daily faces As an evening west To a fine, pedantic sunshine In a satin vest.

  Emily Dickinson

  Sunshine, West, Faces

  Emily Dickinson, Ralph William Franklin (1999). “The Poems of Emily Dickinson”, p.84, Harvard University Press

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• I have no little insight into the feelings of furniture, and treat books and prints with a reasonable consideration. How some people use their pictures, for instance, is a mystery to me; very revolting all the same--portraits obliged to face each other for ever--prints put together in portfolios.

  Robert Browning

  Book, People, Feelings

  Robert Browning (2015). “Love Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett”, p.267, e-artnow sro

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• We only serve as a model for the portrait of our fame.

  Jean Cocteau

  Fame, Models

  Jean Cocteau (1990). “Opium: The Illustrated Diary of His Cure”, Peter Owen Publishers

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• The painter's portrait and the physicist's explanation are both rooted in reality, but they have been changed by the painter or the physicist into something more subtly imagined than the photographic appearance of things.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Reality, Appearance, Changed

  Jacob Bronowski (1965). “Science and Human Values”, HarperCollins Publishers

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