Portraiture Quotes - Page 3

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.

Stuart Pearson Wright

Opportunity, Thinking, Phones

7 Copy quote
A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.

John Singer Sargent

Portraits, Mouths, Painting

57 Copy quote
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.

John Singer Sargent

Hate, Believe, Men

44 Copy quote
I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front.

Paul Cezanne

Shirts, Fronts

6 Copy quote
I never paint a portrait from a photograph, because a photograph doesn't give enough information about what the person feels.

Francesco Clemente

Giving, Portraits, Information

13 Copy quote
To get someone to pose, you have to be very good friends and above all speak the language.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Good Friend, Language, Speak

10 Copy quote
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.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beautiful, Eye, Heart

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1851). “Essays, lectures and orations”, p.152

8 Copy quote

Show source
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.

Michel de Montaigne

Men, Different, Faces

7 Copy quote
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, Portraits, Looks

7 Copy quote
The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.

Imogen Cunningham

Photography, Fascinating

23 Copy quote
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?

Oriana Fallaci

Portraits, Want, Paint

7 Copy quote
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.

Leon Battista Alberti

Art, Faces, Praise

7 Copy quote
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.

Jules Breton

Eye, Wife, Overcoming

7 Copy quote
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.

Willem de Kooning

Thinking, Today, Paint

Barbara Hess, Willem De Kooning (2004). “Willem de Kooning, 1904-1997: Content as a Glimpse”, p.33, Taschen

41 Copy quote

Show source
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.

Joe Fafard

Clay, Looks, Characterization

7 Copy quote
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.

Nelson Shanks

Presidential, Age, Portraits

7 Copy quote
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.

Robert Genn

Eye, Kissing, Curves

7 Copy quote
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.

Albert Watson

Two, People, Cameras

17 Copy quote
Herein lies the main objective of portraiture and also its main difficulty. The photographer probes for the innermost. The lens sees only the surface... .

Philippe Halsman

Lying, Lenses, Photographer

Philippe Halsman (1972). “Halsman sight and insight”

16 Copy quote

Show source
In terms of the class structure that you see so much in European portraiture, I don't think one feels that in America in the 21st century. But we have these other kinds of social structures now, like celebrity, who establish new hierarchies.

Will Cotton

Thinking, Class, America

4 Copy quote
All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.

William Butler Yeats

Art, Essence, Purpose

8 Copy quote
I still find doing portraits a terrific challenge, but even though I've done hundreds of them, I've never stopped questioning the very nature of portraiture because it deals exclusively with appearances. I've never believed people are what they look like and think it's impossible to really know what people are.

Duane Michals

Thinking, People, Challenges

4 Copy quote
I'm interested in how we define things by how we choose to observe them, and how everywhere in our lives, and in every moment we experience, there are forces at work that we don't fully understand. Couple this curiosity with a love of portraiture painting, and that's how this project was born.

Oliver Jeffers

Couple, Curiosity, Painting

"Locating Loss with Oliver Jeffers". Interview with Angela Ledgerwood, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 20, 2014.

16 Copy quote

Show source
When I'm painting and drawing I only do people. Acting is obviously portraiture - and writing is as well.

Antony Sher

Writing, Drawing, People

4 Copy quote
Portraiture keeps me humble. It's simple and straightforward. There is nothing more interesting I can make up than the figure sitting right in front of me.

Jemima Kirke

Humble, Simple, Interesting

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

11 Copy quote

Show source