quotes about Portraiture
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A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.
-- Aldous Huxley -
Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls... if I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist.
-- Alice Neel -
What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.
-- August Wilhelm von Schlegel -
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 -
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Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
With an 'advanced' artist, it's not now possible to make a portrait.
-- Clement Greenberg -
There's no symmetry in nature. One eye is never exactly the same as the other. There's always a difference. We all have a more or less crooked nose and an irregular mouth.
-- Edouard Manet -
I never paint a portrait from a photograph, because a photograph doesn't give enough information about what the person feels.
-- Francesco Clemente -
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There is no self-portrait of me.
-- Gustav KlimtSource : Gustav Klimt, Ankriktip, Abelia Serotina (2016). “Gustav Klimt Artworks”, p.46, Book and Magazine
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The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.
-- Imogen Cunningham -
Self-portraiture is something one should never get involved in, since it is wrong to lie even though one endeavours to tell the truth.
-- Ingmar Bergman -
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 -
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Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.
-- Jamie Wyeth -
My nose isn't big. I just happen to have a very small head.
-- Jimmy Durante -
I do not care to paint portraits indoors. I cannot feel sympathetic.
-- Joaquin Sorolla -
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 -
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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 -
I always work directly from life, partly because I really enjoy having an interaction with the person in front of me but also because I love having a direct response to shape and color.
-- Mary Beth McKenzie -
If a figure doesn't look back at you, you forget it.
-- Nathan OliveiraSource : Nathan Oliveira, Eugenia Parry, Salander-O'Reilly Galleries (1991). “Nathan Oliveira: paintings and works on paper, 1959-1991”
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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 JeffersSource : "Locating Loss with Oliver Jeffers". Interview with Angela Ledgerwood, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 20, 2014.
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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 -
You know, if one paints someone's portrait, one should not know him if possible.
-- Otto Dix -
When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form... one inevitably ends up with an egg.
-- Pablo Picasso -
I don't have lots of things in the background. I do like large faces. I find them strong and contemporary.
-- Paul EmsleySource : "Kate portrait: First painting gets mixed reviews". BBC Interview, www.bbc.com. January 11, 2013.
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To get someone to pose, you have to be very good friends and above all speak the language.
-- Pierre-Auguste Renoir -
It is bad enough to be condemned to drag around this image in which nature has imprisoned me. Why should I consent to the perpetuation of the image of this image?
-- Plotinus -
In a sense, every work you do is a self-portrait because your paintings always reveal more about you than about your subject. Your experience of something, not the something itself, is the true underlying subject of every work you do.
-- Richard Schmid -
It is in some respect greater love in Jesus to sanctify than to justify, for He maketh us most like Himself, in His own essential portraiture and image in sanctifying us.
-- Samuel Rutherford -
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The painter must always seek the essence of things, always represent the essential characteristics and emotions of the person he is painting...
-- Titian -
The portrait painter... If he insults his sitters his occupation is gone. Whether he paints the should instead of the features, or the latter with all its natural blemishes, he is as presumptuous as if he shouted, 'What a face. Hide it.' which would never do, although it is analogous to what landscape painters are doing every day.
-- Walter J. Phillips -
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 -
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 -
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What I remember about being painted was a very severe atmosphere. I remember her intensity and sharp glance.
-- Andrew Neel -
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.
-- Beat Streuli -
And there's even a lord named Lord Dashwood [like the characters in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility]. It's very steeped in Austen. It's been used in many films, but not in its entirety and we shot the inside and the outside and used every nook and cranny. The inside is very gaudy. It's a little naughty inside. There's a lot of portraiture.
-- Jerusha Hess -
All art is self-portraiture.
-- Kehinde WileySource : Source: www.aaa.si.edu
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We have a lot of sort of received historical ways of viewing portraiture. And I suppose in some way I'm sort of questioning that by toying with the rules of the game.
-- Kehinde WileySource : Source: www.aaa.si.edu
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Portraiture is something that we're all drawn to. I think primarily other forms - we prefer, by and large, to look at human beings than a bowl of fruit.
-- Kehinde Wiley -
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.
-- Kehinde Wiley -
A photographic close-up is perhaps the purest form of portraiture, creating a confrontation between the viewer and the subject that daily interaction makes impossible, or at least impolite.
-- Martin Schoeller -
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I try to paint from life, but I had such a miserable experience with Bonaparte, who wouldn't sit still and kept mumbling about catching a cold and something incoherent about Wellington , so I finally decided to work from photos.
-- Roman Genn