Top 61 Quotes About Portraiture
#1. The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.
Imogen Cunningham
#2. Beware how in making the portraiture thou breakest the pattern: for divinity maketh the love of ourselves the pattern; the love of our neighbours but the portraiture.
John Locke
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. The self-portrait is an act of objectifying the self and in that regard is a unique form of portraiture.
Burton Silverman
#7. 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
#8. Portraiture has its risks, and I suppose a dissident Free Presbyterian fatwa is one of them.
Alexander McCall Smith
#9. The photographer, even in fashion and portraiture, has to have a standpoint. It's important to know what you stand for, no? Most people just take pictures, but they stand for nothing. They follow trends and don't know why.
Peter Lindbergh
#10. A form of art that I like is portraiture. I've been thinking about portraiture, and its relationship to writing and literature, biography and autobiography, and so that will be my next thing.
Robert Dessaix
#11. I personally made a decision many years ago that I wanted to crawl into portraiture because it had a lot of latitude.
Annie Leibovitz
#12. There are cells in the brain that respond to faces. This is one of the reasons that I deal with portraiture. We can learn a lot about our perception of facial expression from the behavior of these cells.
Eric Kandel
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, immortal longings.
Elizabeth Bowen
#16. 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
#17. Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother's unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture.
Mary McCarthy
#18. 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
#19. God often lays the sum of His amazing providences in very dismal afflictions; as the limner first puts on the dusky colors, on which he intends to draw the portraiture of some illustrious beauty.
Stephen Charnock
#20. An artist who painted a face was now 'playing with the idea of portraiture,' or 'exploring push-pull aesthetics,' or toying with contradictions like 'menacing-slash-playful,' but he or she was never, ever, just painting a face.
Steve Martin
#21. And best of all, as the highest portraiture of Jesus, try to forgive your enemies, as He did; and let those sublime words of your Master, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do," always ring in your ears. Forgive, as you hope to be forgiven.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#22. Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.
Jonathan Franzen
#23. When I'm painting and drawing I only do people. Acting is obviously portraiture - and writing is as well.
Antony Sher
#24. 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
#25. Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.
Vincent Van Gogh
#26. I wanted to make photographs that were immediate and revealing - different from traditional portraiture that called for formal distance between artist and subject.
Wendy Ewald
#27. After 20 years of painting wildlife subjects in acrylic, I felt the need for a change and began to explore portraiture and landscape in oils.
Ron Parker
#28. 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
#29. I never paint a portrait from a photograph, because a photograph doesn't give enough information about what the person feels.
Francesco Clemente
#30. With an 'advanced' artist, it's not now possible to make a portrait.
Clement Greenberg
#31. 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
#32. To get someone to pose, you have to be very good friends and above all speak the language.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#33. What I remember about being painted was a very severe atmosphere. I remember her intensity and sharp glance.
Andrew Neel
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. My nose isn't big. I just happen to have a very small head.
Jimmy Durante
#38. I loathe my own face, and I've done self-portraits because I've had nobody else to do.
Francis Bacon
#39. I want to paint men and women with that something of the external which the halo used to symbolize, and which we now seek to give by the actual radiance and vibrancy of our colorings.
Vincent Van Gogh
#40. 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
#41. Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character.
Charles Baudelaire
#42. An act of naming should quite rightly enable me to call any-thing a self-portrait, not only any drawing, 'portrait' or not, but everything that happens to me, that I can affect, or that affects me.
Jacques Derrida
#43. I do not care to paint portraits indoors. I cannot feel sympathetic.
Joaquin Sorolla
#44. I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front.
Paul Cezanne
#45. When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form ... one inevitably ends up with an egg.
Pablo Picasso
#46. Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls ... if I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist.
Alice Neel
#48. 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
#49. A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.
Aldous Huxley
#50. 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
#51. Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.
Jamie Wyeth
#52. 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
#53. If my people look as if they're in a dreadful fix, it's because I can't get them out of a technical dilemma.
Francis Bacon
#54. 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
#55. I remember that at one time I always made a drawing before going to bed!! - Of myself I mean - though I finally destroyed most of them.
James Whistler
#56. I don't have lots of things in the background. I do like large faces. I find them strong and contemporary.
Paul Emsley
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
