Portraits Quotes - Page 7

• What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it.

  Aubrey Beardsley

  Photography, Artist, Perfect

  "Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography". Book by Matthew Sturgis, p. 189, 1999.

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• I do not see in what way the face of a man should be a less interesting landscape than any other. A man, the physical person of a man, is a little world, like any other a country, with its towns, and suburbs.. ..As a rule what is needed in a portrait is a great deal of the general, and very little of the particular.

  Jean Dubuffet

  Country, Men, Interesting

  "Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, Vol. II". Book by Jean Dubuffet, p. 63-73, 1967.

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• Every single person is unlike anyone else. Therefore, in creating a portrait of someone... we must look carefully to catch that particular unique quality. In fact, we can neglect nothing because everything we select or do sends a message to the observer.

  Alton Tobey

  Unique, Creating, Quality

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• So long as people expect paintings to be simply coloured photographs they get no individuality and, in the case of portraits, no characterisation.

  William Dobell

  Long, People, Individuality

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• As a boy, I used to look at reproductions of Rembrandt's portraits... the people in his paintings were so real I felt I knew them... It is his empathy for the sitter, combined with his enjoyment and dexerity in handling paint that captured my imagination then, and is what I am striving for still.

  David Cobley

  Real, Boys, Imagination

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• Sometimes, in a portrait, I go straight in with paint onto canvas... Other than riding my bike up and down the hills around here, it is the most dangerous thing I do... like tightrope-walking without a safety net!

  David Cobley

  Safety, Riding, Canvas

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• Self-deceit is a most damaging trait. The remedy, for an artist, is to paint a self-portrait!

  Scott Kahn

  Artist, Self, Deception

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• 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

  Portraiture, Want, Paint

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• I'm interested in human vulnerability. We are alone, and my portraits reflect this quality. I don't want anything to get in the way of this feeling.

  Thomas S. Buechner

  Feelings, Quality, Way

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• Painting someone's portrait is, of course, an impossible task. What an absurd idea to try and distil a human being, the most complex organism on the planet, into flicks, washes, and blobs of paint on a two-dimensional surface.

  David Cobley

  Ideas, Two, Trying

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• We... joked a little about presidential portraits. He [Bill Clinton] told me that he and Harrison Ford had been joking recently about how chins drop with age, and he didn't want to look that way.

  Nelson Shanks

  Presidential, Age, Looks

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• 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

  Sight, Comfort, Form

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• 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

  Eye, Wife, Overcoming

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• On the left is the realist tradition of the 19th century, with its impulse to social description, radical criticism and meditation on things as they are... culminating in Courbet at his mightiest (The Studio, The Funeral at Ornans and a portrait of a trout that has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion).

  Gustave Courbet

  Funeral, Meditation, Criticism

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• I never paint a portrait from a photograph, because a photograph doesn't give enough information about what the person feels.

  Francesco Clemente

  Giving, Portraiture, Information

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• The painter's portrait and the physicist's explanation are both rooted in reality, but they have been changed by the painter or the physicist into something more subtly imagined than the photographic appearance of things.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Reality, Appearance, Changed

  Jacob Bronowski (1965). “Science and Human Values”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• I also remember when I watched Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer [1990] at, like, age 15. That scared the crap out of me. Because it didn't operate inside the usual conventions of the horror genre in the way that I could accept. I can accept horny teenager counselors being murdered at camp. But I couldn't accept the derangement of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which was that anyone could be murdered at any moment - whole families, with no build-up music and no meaning. It terrified me.

  Christopher Bollen

  Teenager, Horror Genre, Horny

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• 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

  Photography, Art, People

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• The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology.

  Jamie Wyeth

  Danger, Methodology, Painter

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• Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas. Paint is a cast made of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's body and thoughts.

  James Elkins

  Records, Movement, Body

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.5, Routledge

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• Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.

  Pierre-Auguste Renoir

  Photography, Painting, Starting

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• 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

  Personality, Portraiture, Biographies

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• I thought, 'Well, I'll amuse people a little bit.' During lunch hour, while everyone was off to the faculty club and this and that, I set up a bunch of bases down the hallway of the school and I put all of the portraits I had completed... and I waited for the reaction.... that's how I got started again, doing portraits of people around me.

  Joe Fafard

  Fun, School, Lunch

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• The severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some real substance in that invisible fabric.

  Thomas Browne

  Philosophy, Real, School

  Sir Thomas Browne (1831). “Miscellaneous Works of Sir Thomas Browne: With Some Account of the Author and His Writings”, p.25

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• A photographic portrait needs more collaboration between sitter and artist than a painted portrait.

  Alvin Langdon Coburn

  Artist, Collaboration, Needs

  Alvin Langdon Coburn, Alison Gernsheim (1978). “Alvin Langdon Coburn, Photographer: An Autobiography with Over 70 Reproductions of His Works”, p.24, Courier Corporation

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