Top 74 Quotes About Self Portraits
#1. Self-portraits are a way of revealing something about oneself.
Eric Kandel
#2. I felt that the beach portraits were all self-portraits. That moment of unease, that attempt to find a pose, it was all about me.
Rineke Dijkstra
#3. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits,
N.D. Wilson
#5. I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.
Frida Kahlo
#6. I loathe my own face, and I've done self-portraits because I've had nobody else to do.
Francis Bacon
#7. Painting self-portraits without clothes on has also given me some publicity.
Cleo Moore
#8. I have always loved the amateur side of photography, automatic photographs, accidental photographs with uncentered compositions, heads cut off, whatever. I incite people to make their self-portraits. I see myself as their walking photo booth.
William Klein
#9. Michael used to draw self-portraits with nightmares hidden in his curls.
Janet Fitch
#10. Bruheem kol dumuyay eloha! Blessed are all God's self-portraits.
Richard Zimler
#11. Everyone thinks these are self-portraits but they aren't meant to be. I just use myself as a model because I know I can push myself to extremes, make each shot as ugly or goofy or silly as possible.
Cindy Sherman
#12. 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
#13. I do not care about my own appearance, but I would hope that people could see into my soul, and that is presented better in these photographs than in others. (On his self-portraits)
August Strindberg
#14. All we are doing are self-portraits. As simple that. We accumulate knowledge and wisdom and power, and we get our hearts broken, and we write. We write for others to absorb what took us so long to understand.
Cristian Mihai
#15. I always take a close look at those who lose themselves in self portraits. They are solitary souls, prone to introspection, who have really grappled with their existence.
Young-Ha Kim
#16. Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along the mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself.
N.D. Wilson
#17. Each person's work is always a portrait of himself.
Samuel Johnson
#18. 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
#20. Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#21. From a most kind suggestion put to me by Mr Farraday himself one afternoon almost a fortnight ago, when I had been dusting the portraits in the library. In fact, as I recall, I was up on the step-ladder dusting the portrait of Viscount Wetherby
Anonymous
#22. I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I have face blindness, and once a face is flattened out, I can remember it better.
Chuck Close
#23. For years the first of May was the day all leases expired, and on that day mass migrations would take place, with families lugging eiderdowns and ancestral portraits through the streets, as if in parody of the march of the wagon trains.
Luc Sante
#24. I feel like vocals are to music what portraits are to painting. They're the humanity. Landscapes are good and fine, but at the end of the day everyone loves the Mona Lisa.
Grimes
#25. I do mostly portraits. So it's just people's faces, not really any ideas.
Andy Warhol
#26. 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
#27. A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.
Robert Hughes
#28. But, memory paints impressionistic portraits of the past, enhancing some images and blurring others. To her,
Monique Martin
#29. He exhibited three portraits, each a masterpiece, which killed every picture within range.
E.F. Benson
#30. Up the stairs I found an imposing headquarters, decorated with the portraits and busts of solemn, whiskered old darlings who, no doubt, bled their customers with leeches and passed on the information to alarmed small boys that self-abuse leads to blindness.
John Mortimer
#31. I'm not exactly sure how old the girls are [in Bink & Gollie], but I can pretty much guarantee that their parents will never show up. That would mess up the fun. I do, however, very much like Kate's idea of having Tony [Fucile] draw their portraits.
Kate DiCamillo
#32. It's quite true that what I am aiming at, even when I take portraits, is to get a scandalous picture. I would love to be a paparazzo.
Helmut Newton
#33. What we know about Cleopatra's looks is based purely on her coin portraits. Engraving was imperfect, and that when you are a ruler and you ask for a coin to be engraved with your likeness on it, you are probably trying to project a certain air of authority.
Stacy Schiff
#34. Of what use are pedigrees, or to be thought of noble blood, or the display of family portraits, O Ponticus?
Juvenal
#35. I used to always make art for girls. That was the thing I did for girls to like me. I did portraits, drawings, letters that formed outlines of significant things in our relationship. Art. I just used art in general. It usually worked.
Cary Fukunaga
#36. What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.
Charles Baudelaire
#37. But Maurice was clean-shaven, and, by the portraits shown to me, certainly quite beautiful; though he looked a little more like a tenor than a gentleman ought to look. James
G.K. Chesterton
#38. My dad was a photographer, so we had all these studio portraits of us.
Timothy Simons
#39. I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models ... I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know ...
Francis Bacon
#40. Many intelligent people, when about to write ... , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#41. The humor for me is how far above your head the signature is - it's dislocated from the sign of the artist in such a distinct way that it could almost be a self-portrait of a sort.
Laura Owens
#42. Everything in a wide sense is a kind of a self-portrait. It's just the way you see things and you're curious about certain things and just excited about them.
Jurgen Teller
#43. I don't use names or captions for my many portraits of politicians and authors for newspapers. The drawing has to be self-explanatory, so I spend a lot of time sketching to find an idea and an angle that is clear.
Siegfried Woldhek
#44. 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
#46. Improvisational things about picture-making ... learned from working with the small camera early on have served me well in being able to think quickly when making [portraits].
Dawoud Bey
#47. Portraits I've done in the past I've always thought were a reflection of me.
Judy Dater
#48. There are portraits and still-lifes
And the first, because 'human'
Does not excel the second
Charles Tomlinson
#49. Portrait The world spreads out on either side no farther than the heart is wide.
Emily Dickinson
#50. The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology.
Jamie Wyeth
#51. I was a terrible painter - my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso's demoiselles and the BBC test card clown.
Sarah Hall
#52. I often concentrate on the eyes and lips, they are great indicators of mood and feeling, and I find that I can project character into my portraits by bringing the viewer's attention to these areas.
Robert Ryan
#53. A portrait isn't a fact but an opinion - an occasion rather than a truth.
Richard Avedon
#54. It is a scholar's task to find patterns in nature or cycles in history. Initially, it's no different from finding portraits of animals and heroes in the stars. The question is, Have you discovered a preexisting truth? Or have you imposed an arbitrary meaning on whatever it is you're considering?
Mary Doria Russell
#55. Karl stood up and pointed at the large portraits on the wall. He swept the room from George Washington to Ben Franklin to John Adams to Thomas Jefferson. "Soldier, Printer, Lawyer, Scholar. You become a politician because the people make you one, not because you desire to be one.
Jeff Ferry
#56. Portrait painters' mission is to portray people and the beauty of Creation. They should stay clear of ego ...
Igor Babailov
#57. We only serve as a model for the portrait of our fame.
Jean Cocteau
#58. Winckelmann wished to live with a work of art as a friend. The saying is true of pen and pencil. Fresh lustre shoots from Lycidas in a twentieth perusal. The portraits of Clarendon are mellowed by every year of reflection.
Robert Aris Willmott
#59. A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.
Richard Avedon
#60. Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don't know.
Imogen Cunningham
#61. Portraits are the most intimate photographs. The image will survive the subject.
Victor Skrebneski
#62. Your dreams are the product of your longings, a portrait of your potential, and a promise of your future.
Erwin McManus
#63. I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
Gertrude Stein
#64. As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#65. In my portraits I try to avoid the fleeting expression and vivacity of a snapshot.
Bill Brandt
#66. He [William Merritt Chase] is, I suspect, getting a very truthful likeness. I would like it better if [it] was not so gray, so cramped about the eyes, and not quite so corpulent. But is this not quarreling with nature?
Rutherford B. Hayes
#67. A family portrait is only complete with love to fill it's frame.
Wes Fesler
#68. 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
#69. I refer to what I do as 'conceptual portraits,' meaning that I come up with an idea or concept that I would like to explore, and then I find people that fit that idea.
Alix Smith
#70. [Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.
Gertrude Atherton
#71. The table was a pool of candlelight -- so bright that the rest of the room seemed almost black, with the faces of the family portraits floating in the darkness.
Dodie Smith
#72. He taught me to be a Da Vinci
and I sit here, with his portraits
waiting for him to return
I do not think he will
Is that what it means to be human
to be all powerful,
to build a temple to yourself
and leave
only the walls to pray
Phil Kaye
#73. Bollocks," Ryan said. "I've seen you draw. You're very good, especially at drawing portraits."
James almost laughed. He wasn't all that good at drawing portraits. He was good at drawing Ryan.
Alessandra Hazard
#74. You will never see a portrait of my love, for miracles are never seen.
Steve Lawrence
