Portraits Quotes - Page 13

• 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

  Nice, Doe, Stories

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• Tim Thornton's portrait of a pop culture obsession is so convincing that one can't help wishing that his fictional alt rock band actually existed, or suspecting that they did. The Alternative Hero is a weirdly compelling portrait of fanatic fandom which reads like High Fidelity at high volume.

  Jay McInerney

  Hero, Rocks, Wish

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• We don't have to live up to the expectations of others. Passion is personal. As long as our passion is fueled with the right stuff then keep on plodding forward. I'll never be Mark Twain or Tom Clancy. But that's okay, because neither of them could teach you to mix a boundless number of grays, or where to place the catch light in a portrait.

  Jack White

  Passion, Light, Numbers

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• I want paint to work as flesh... my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them ... As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does.

  Lucian Freud

  People, Doe, Looks

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• If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.

  Heloise

  Memories, Regret, Character

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• I always prefer photographing in available light – or Rembrandt-light I like to call it – so you get the natural modulations of the face. It makes a more alive, real, and flattering portrait.

  Alfred Eisenstaedt

  Photography, Real, Light

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• To do a portrait today, I decide how close I can get to my subject. First, of course, mentally or intellectually, then in the viewfinder. Music cues the subject and me when to shoot. The music played during a photography session is most important - stimulating to the subject and to me. As in a film, the music builds or becomes quiet, romantic; just one note sets the actor up to emote for his audience. I want a reciprocal portrait, not a bureaucratic one

  Victor Skrebneski

  Photography, Important, Actors

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• It seems dangerous to be a portrait artist who does commissions for clients because everyone wants to be flattered, so they pose in such a way that there's nothing left of truth.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Photography, Artist, Doe

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• God sends experience to paint men's portraits.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Men, Experience, Paint

  henry ward beecher (1858). “life thoughts,”, p.164

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• Make people's portraits in familiar and typical attitudes.

  Edgar Degas

  Attitude, People, Typical

  Robert Hale Ives Gammell, Edgar Degas (1961). “The shop-talk of Edgar Degas”

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• Utilitarianism had found [in Samuel Smiles' Self-Help] its portrait gallery of heroes, inscribed with a vigorous exhortation to all men to strive in their image; this philistine romanticism established the bourgeois hero-prototype the penniless office-boy who works his way to economic fortune and this wins his way into the mercantile plutocracy.

  John Carroll

  Hero, Winning, Boys

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• One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.

  Oswald Spengler

  Eye, One Day, Bars

  Oswald Spengler (1926). “The Decline of the West...: Form and actuality”

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• A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.

  Edvard Munch

  Believe, Artist, Persons

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• If I was in love with someone, I would get their picture out of the school yearbook and do portraits. If I was curious about sex, I would draw pictures of it. There were no books for me to look at. Then I would go find my father's matches to burn the paper.

  Lynn Johnston

  Sex, Father, Book

  Interview with Tom Heintjes, cartoonician.com. 1994.

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• Every record is a portrait of the band at that time.

  Jimmy Page

  Band, Records

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• Bruheem kol dumuyay eloha! Blessed are all God's self-portraits.

  Richard Zimler

  Blessed, Self, Self Portrait

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• My work has been about making a record of my life that no one can revise. I photograph myself in times of trouble or change in order to find the ground to stand on in the change. I was coming out of a melancholic phase. This was taken when I was traveling extensively, on the road from hotel to hotel. You get displaced, and then taking self-portraits becomes a way of hanging on to yourself.

  Nan Goldin

  Taken, Self, Order

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• My paintings are loosely based on meta narratives. The pictures float in and out of pictorial genres. Still life's become personified, portraits become events, and landscapes become constructions. I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive.

  Dana Schutz

  Events, Alive, Landscape

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• Fruits ... like having their portrait painted. They seem to sit there and ask your forgiveness for fading. Their thought is given off with their perfumes. They come with all their scents, they speak of the fields they have left, the rain which has nourished them, the daybreaks they have seen.

  Paul Cezanne

  Rain, Fading, Scent

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• What a business is this of a portrait painter! You bring him a potato and expect he will paint you a peach.

  Gilbert Stuart

  Potatoes, Peaches, Paint

  Carrie Rebora Barratt, Gilbert Stuart, Ellen Gross Miles (2004). “Gilbert Stuart”, p.6, Metropolitan Museum of Art

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• The Shriver Report presents an accurate and detailed portrait of American women and families at this transformational moment in our history.

  Maria Shriver

  Moments, Accurate, American Woman

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• An important documentary that sheds light on one of the most terrifying realities in the U.S. today—the commercial sexual exploitation of young girls. TRICKED is a comprehensive portrait of all the players in this human rights abuse: survivors, traffickers, johns and cops. Everyone should see this film.

  Rachel Lloyd

  Girl, Player, Reality

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• An up-close portrait of middle-class Nigeria exploring the boundaries of morals and public decorum. Pitched between humor and despair, with stripped-down, evocative prose, A Bit of Difference bristles with penknife-sharp dialogue, but its truths are more subtle, hiding in the unspoken. Ultimately, A Bit of Difference explores – with a hint of mischief–the problem of how to look like you have no problems when you have abundant problems–the universal problem of the socially-motivated classes.

  Nii Parkes

  Class, Differences, Despair

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• At first, I thought 'this series is going to be all about death and desecration,' but instead became a more complex landscape of human relationships. I hope I put something of these feelings into the portraits that I made of the characters, which were landscapes in themselves. An irony in the subject of crystal meth is how beautifully it resembles the desert sky.

  Ralph Steadman

  Character, Sky, Feelings

  "The day when Bill Murray got festive and Belle & Sebastian went techno" by Sam Richards, www.theguardian.com. October 14, 2014.

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• Edith Sitwell's interest in art was largely confined to portraits of herself.

  John Fowles

  Art, Interest, Confined

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