Portrait Art Quotes

#1. The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.

Susan Sontag

#2. In 1970, I was turning 29 years old, just 4 years out of art school. I had created a black and white drawing style mascot portrait called 'Johnny.' I made a poster for it and sent it around the world to corporate art departments.

John Van Hamersveld

#3. A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Richard Avedon

#4. There is always a commanding and simple line around each head. Learn to have a love for the big simple line.

Robert Henri

#5. The portrait is one of the most curious art forms. It demands special qualities in the artist, and an almost total kinship with the model.

Henri Matisse

#6. In art, there is no need for color; I see only light and shade. Give me a crayon, and I will paint your portrait.

Francisco Goya

#7. I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography - that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms.

Joel Meyerowitz

#8. With lead he shaded love into the woman's eyes.

Dean Koontz

#9. A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter ... one must paint its atmosphere.

Umberto Boccioni

#10. Sculpture may be almost anything: a monument, a statue, an old coin, a bas-relief, a portrait bust, a lifelong struggle against heavy odds.

Malvina Hoffman

#11. Bodybuilding is an art, your body is the canvas, weights are your brush and nutrition is your paint. We all have the ability to turn a self portrait into a masterpiece.

Kai Greene

#12. Your art ... " I gaped at the field of white. "There was a lovely portrait of me - right there."
I get offended whenever art is damaged, especially if that art features me.

Rick Riordan

#13. When they were in school, Peter used to say that everything you do is a self-portrait. It might look like 'Saint George and the Dragon' or 'The Rape of the Sabine Women,' but the angle you use, the lighting, the composition, the technique, they're all you. You are every color and brushstroke.

Chuck Palahniuk

#14. I painted with my husband a portrait of a naked Serge Gainsbourg draped with a French flag, and it hangs in our bedroom. I love gritty and dark art like what the German couple Herakut does.

Stephanie Szostak

#15. The snapshots in CHINA: Portrait of a People are not meant to be works of art. I was too preoccupied with participating, with reveling in the moment, to worry about their perfection. Their purpose, then, is to form a candid portrait of China exactly as China presented itself to me.

Tom Carter

#16. From Portrait of a Landscape

I think art only exists when it's being made. It's like a flower. Once picked, it starts to die.

Daniel D. Watkins

#17. There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.

Charles Dickens

#18. I love prints of skulls and bones and have some taxidermy - a crow and a rabbit - to remind me of home. I like art and have a big portrait of Bjork.

Ellie Goulding

#19. 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

#20. SELF PORTRAIT: Throwing Armfuls of Air into the Air

Jandy Nelson

#21. You know how you feel somebody looking at you, and you turn, and somebody actually is? It's the same at an art gallery. You're looking at one portrait, turn around, and there is a work of art directly behind you. Because it's all energy. Every single thing has energy.

Marina Abramovic

#22. NEXT LIFE. My embroidery studio on the main street of Bayeux will be just one part of my Institute of Slow Information. I will also teach letter writing, listening, miniature portrait painting, and the art of doing one thing at a time.

Vivian Swift

#23. Those words ... national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.

A.S. Byatt