Portraits Quotes - Page 6

• The portrait painter... If he insults his sitters his occupation is gone. Whether he paints the should instead of the features, or the latter with all its natural blemishes, he is as presumptuous as if he shouted, 'What a face. Hide it.' which would never do, although it is analogous to what landscape painters are doing every day.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Gone, Portraiture, Occupation

  8 Copy quote

• The teacher showed us how to see proportions, relationships, light and shadow, negative space, and space between space - something I never noticed before! In one week, I went from not knowing how to draw to sketching a detailed portrait. It literally changed the way I see things.

  Daniel H. Pink

  Teacher, Light, Drawing

  "Why right-brainers will rule this century". Interview with Oprah Winfrey, www.cnn.com. May 7, 2009.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• He who draws... ought to take his position so that the eye of the figure he is drawing is on a level with his own... because, generally, figures or people whom you meet in the streets all have their eyes at the same level as yours, and if you make them higher or lower you will find that your portrait will not resemble them.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Eye, Drawing, People

  Leonardo (da Vinci) (1938). “The notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• You will not get to steal quietly into heaven, into Christ's company, without a conflict and a cross. I find crosses to be Christ's carved work that he marks out for us and that with crosses he portraits us to his own image, cutting away pieces of our ill and corruption. Lord cut - Lord carve - Lord wound - Lord do anything that may perfect thy Father's image in us and make us ready for glory.

  Samuel Rutherford

  Father, Cutting, Perfect

  35 Copy quote

• Of what use are pedigrees, or to be thought of noble blood, or the display of family portraits, O Ponticus?

  Juvenal

  Blood, Noble, Use

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 23-25, Satires, VIII, line 1, 1922.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• That moment when the person actually dictates the way I do the portrait is when the intimacy arrives.

  Francesco Clemente

  Way, Moments, Intimacy

  7 Copy quote

• The painter who is so enamoured by the beauties of the parts of a landscape, that he strives to represent all, cannot succeed. His picture will be an arrangement of a series of portraits of things without unity... There must be variety and contrast, but in measured doses.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Simplicity, Unity, Landscape

  7 Copy quote

• In some circles Stalin has in fact been making a comeback. His portrait hangs above the dashboard of trucks, a symbol of blue- collar nostalgia for a tough leader.

  Serge Schmemann

  Blue, Circles, Leader

  53 Copy quote

• With an 'advanced' artist, it's not now possible to make a portrait.

  Clement Greenberg

  Artist, Portraiture

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Self, Drawing, Portraiture

  7 Copy quote

• That is what [Andy] Warhol portraits do: They elevate the subject into an icon of the pop culture he was documenting.

  Giorgio Armani

  Icons, Culture, Warhol

  Interview Magazine Interview, www.interviewmagazine.com. December 1, 2008.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm at the age where I don't need an acid trip to feel naked... to feel that I don't exist. Now a self-portrait is almost a reminder to me that I do exist.

  Francesco Clemente

  Self, Age, Naked

  18 Copy quote

• A portrait of the young Charlie Parker with a degree of vivid detail never before approached. . . [Kansas City Lightning is] a deft, virtuosic panorama of early jazz. . . This is a mind-opening, and mind-filling, book.

  Tom Piazza

  Book, Cities, Kansas City

  6 Copy quote

• I will never, for the future, paint the portrait of a tyrant until his head lies before me on the scaffold.

  Jacques-Louis David

  Lying, Tyrants, Paint

  36 Copy quote

• Mr. Robinson and Mr. Kovite have...written a captivating coming-of-age novel that is, by turns, funny and sad and elegiac -\-\ a novel that leaves us with some revealing snapshots of America, both at war and in denial, and some telling portraits of a couple of millennials trying to grope their way toward adulthood.

  Michiko Kakutani

  Couple, War, America

  6 Copy quote

• When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form... one inevitably ends up with an egg.

  Pablo Picasso

  Eggs, Portraiture, Elimination

  10 Copy quote

• Judged by the stark, sure-footed portrait in Hard Time, Brian Azzarello and Richard Corben clearly have John Constantine down, cold and to the life. Azzarellos grasp of pacing, character and situation resonates through every scene with a black crystal clarity thats short of masterful, while Corben contributes what is, perhaps, one of the most darkly expressive pieces in a long, already-legendary career.

  Alan Moore

  Character, Hard Times, Careers

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Eye, Truthful, Appearance

  4 Copy quote

• My portraits are half what I see and the other half is invented or dictated by the person and the painting.

  Francesco Clemente

  Half, Painting, Invention

  14 Copy quote

• A beautiful person among the Greeks, was thought to betray by this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods; and we can pardonpride, when a woman possesses such a figure that wherever she stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow on the wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she confers a favor on the world.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beauty, Beautiful, Wall

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.202, Graphic Arts Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Portraiture, Faces, Painting

  7 Copy quote

• When I make a portrait,I cannot limit it tothe lines of the head, for that head belongs toa body, it exists ina setting which influences it, it is part of a totality that I cannot suppress. The impression you produce upon me is not thesame if I catchsight of youalone ina gardenor if Isee you in the midst of a group of other people, in a living room or on the street.

  Medardo Rosso

  People, Body, Lines

  Quoted in Edmond Claris De l'impressionisme en sculpture, 'Medardo Rosso' (1902).

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ancient portraits are symbolic images without any immediate relation to the individuals represented; they are not portraits as we understand them. It is remarkable that philologists who are capable of carrying accuracy to the extremes in the case of words are as credulous as babies when it comes to "images," and yet an image is so full of information that ten thousands words would not add up to it.

  George Sarton

  Baby, Add, Information

  "A History of Science". Book by George Sarton. Volume 2: "Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three Centuries B.C.", Preface, 1959.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• It should also be born in mind that the research on 'movement' and the dynamic outlook on the world, which were the basis of Futurist theory, in no way required one to paint nothing but speeding cars or ballerinas in action; for a person who is seated, or an inanimate object, though apparently static, could be considered dynamically and suggest dynamic forms. I may mention as an example the 'Portrait of Madame S.' (1912) and the 'Seated Woman' (1914).

  Gino Severini

  Car, Mind, Research

  "Letters of the great artists". Book by Richard Friedenthal, p. 248, 1963.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I planted some jokes in my wedding. Like, the organizers asked me to select music. So when I approached wife at the ceremony, they played the second movement from Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, which is usually known as the "portrait of Stalin." And then when we embraced, the music that they played was Schubert's "Death and the Maiden." I enjoyed this in a childish way! But marriage was all a nightmare and so on and so on.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Symphony, Wife, Way

  26 Copy quote