Portraiture Quotes

• 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

  Art, Self, Experience

  60 Copy quote

• Faces are the most interesting things we see; other people fascinate me, and the most interesting aspect of other people - the point where we go inside them - is the face. It tells all.

  David Hockney

  People, Interesting, Faces

  David Hockney, Musée national d'art moderne (France) (1982). “David Hockney photographs”

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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

  7 Copy quote

• It's not the act of arrogance to draw, it's humbling - you must use your God-given talent. And of all the people I sketch, in most cases I feel I have to measure up to the subject.

  LeRoy Neiman

  People, Arrogance, Use

  45 Copy quote

• I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.

  Frida Kahlo

  Love, Art, Happy Friday

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• If a figure doesn't look back at you, you forget it.

  Nathan Oliveira

  Looks, Forget, Figures

  Nathan Oliveira, Eugenia Parry, Salander-O'Reilly Galleries (1991). “Nathan Oliveira: paintings and works on paper, 1959-1991”

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• 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, Portraits, Elimination

  10 Copy quote

• Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Thinking, Soul, Models

  Vincent van Gogh (2014). “Delphi Complete Works of Vincent van Gogh (Illustrated)”, p.2878, Delphi Classics

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• 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

  Eye, Differences, Noses

  15 Copy quote

• 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, Portraits, Biographies

  7 Copy quote

• I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.

  Frida Kahlo

  Love, Art, Happy Friday

  Hayden Herrera, Frida Kahlo (1992). “Frida Kahlo”, Rizzoli International Publications

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• I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

  Salvador Dali

  Art, Portraits, Doe

  Quoted in Esar A Treasury of Humorous Quotations (1951).

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• The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Two, Portraits, Different

  7 Copy quote

• Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Character, Portraits, Gestures

  Charles Baudelaire, Jonathan Mayne (1981). “Art in Paris 1845-1862: salons and other exhibitions”

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• The painter must always seek the essence of things, always represent the essential characteristics and emotions of the person he is painting.

  Titian

  Essence, Essentials, Emotion

  "The Quotable Artist". Book by Peggy Hadden, p. 71, 2002.

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• Make portraits of people in typical, familiar poses, being sure above all to give their faces the same kind of expression as their bodies.

  Edgar Degas

  Expression, People, Giving

  Edgar Degas, Rachel Barnes (1990). “Degas by Degas”, Alfred A. Knopf

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• Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls... if I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist.

  Alice Neel

  Artist, Soul, Chekhov

  15 Copy quote

• My nose isn't big. I just happen to have a very small head.

  Jimmy Durante

  Noses, Bigs, Happens

  52 Copy quote

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

  Clement Greenberg

  Artist, Portraits

  16 Copy quote

• I am living a new and exalted life of late. It steeps me in a sacred rapture to see a portrait develop and take soul under my hand. First, I throw off a study - just a mere study, a few apparently random lines - and to look at it you would hardly ever suspect who it was going to be; even I cannot tell, myself.

  Mark Twain

  Hands, Soul, Portraits

  Mark Twain (1933). “Mark Twain's works”

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• 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

  Enough, Should, Drag

  14 Copy quote

• When I paint, I seriously consider the public presence of a person - the surface facade. I am less concerned with how people look when they wake up or how they act at home. A person's public presence reflects his own efforts at image development.

  LeRoy Neiman

  Home, People, Effort

  LeRoy Neiman (1974). “Art & lifestyle”

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• 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

  Trying, Cold, Miserable

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Giving, Halos

  7 Copy quote

• Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.

  Jamie Wyeth

  Portraits, Paint, Subjects

  9 Copy quote