Quotes and Sayings About Portraits
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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 -
The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.
-- Aldo Leopold -
To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.
-- Alexander Smith -
A photographic portrait needs more collaboration between sitter and artist than a painted portrait.
-- Alvin Langdon Coburn -
My favorite books have a personality and complexion as distinctly drawn as if the author's portrait were framed into the paragraphs and smiled upon me as I read his illustrated pages.
-- Amos Bronson Alcott -
Jeanne, I fell asleep among the paintings, where I could sit for many days worshipping your portrait. I fell in love with your portrait, Jeanne, because it will never change. I have such a fear of seeing you grow old, Jeanne, I fell in love with an unchanging you that will never be taken away from me. I was wishing you would die, so that no one could take you away from me, and I would love the painting of you as you would look eternally.
-- Anais Nin -
The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
-- Anatole Broyard -
We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us
-- Andre Gide -
I have a portrait of Saint Thomas More in my office.
-- Andrew Cuomo -
When I did my self-portrait, I left all the pimples out because you always should. Pimples are a temporary condition and they don't have anything to do with what you really look like. Always omit the blemishes-they're not part of the good picture you want.
-- Andy Warhol -
In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.
-- Annie Leibovitz -
My early childhood equipped me really well for my portrait work: The quick encounter, where you are not going to know the subject for very long. These days I am much more comfortable with the fifteen minute relationship, than I am with a life long relationship.
-- Annie Leibovitz -
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 -
In front of the model I work with the same will to reproduce truth as if I were making a portrait. I do not correct nature, I incorporate myself into it; it directs me. I can only work with a model. The sight of human forms nourishes and comforts me.
-- Auguste Rodin -
The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective.
-- Berenice Abbott -
Andre Breton once said that a portrait should not only be an image but an oracle one questions, and that the photographer's aim should be a profound likeness, which physically and morally predicts the subject's entire future.
-- Bill Brandt -
When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.
-- Billy Joel -
Life The machine The human soul A 75mm breech My portrait
-- Blaise Cendrars -
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 -
Cristina Eisenberg weaves her observations as a scientist and her personal experiences afield into a resonant account about the web of life that links humans to the natural world. Grounded in best science, inspired by her intimate knowledge of the wolves she studies, she offers us a luminous portrait of the ecological relationships that are essential for our well-being in a rapidly changing world. The Wolf's Tooth calls for a conservation vision that involves rewilding the earth and honoring all our relations.
-- Brenda Peterson -
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 -
The self-portrait is an act of objectifying the self and in that regard is a unique form of portraiture.
-- Burton Silverman -
What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
A man cannot paint portraits till he has seen faces.
-- Christian Nestell Bovee -
Neurologically, I'm a quadriplegic, so virtually everything about my work has been driven by my learning disabilities, which are quite severe, and my lack of facial recognition, which I'm sure is what drove me to paint portraits in the first place.
-- Chuck Close -
I wanted to translate from one flat surface to another.In fact, my learning disabilities controlled a lot of things. I don't recognize faces, so I'm sure it's what drove me to portraits in the first place.
-- Chuck Close -
I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.
-- Cindy Sherman -
With an 'advanced' artist, it's not now possible to make a portrait.
-- Clement Greenberg -
Painting self-portraits without clothes on has also given me some publicity.
-- Cleo Moore
