Portraits Quotations | Page 2

A Wedding In Haiti is a great experience and its unaffected prose is as true a portrait of complex Haiti as you will find.

Pulls readers in with an ironic, breezy portrait of sinister high school competitiveness. Deft and extraordinarily accomplished.

Who would not have been laughed at if he had said in 1800 that metals could be extracted from their ores by electricity or that portraits could be drawn by chemistry.

I do portraits. I usually do live models in a class environment, but I've been painting at home more. I really love the human form, and I love faces. I've tried to do landscapes a few times.

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

To be Despair. It is a portrait. Only close your eyes and feel.

A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth.

In a portrait, you always leave part of yourself behind.

The artist who imagines that he puts his best into a portrait in order to produce something good, which will be a pleasure to the sitter and to himself, will have some bitter experiences.

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.

I remember Steve Kaufman as the artist on Saturday Night Live doing the Pop Art portraits for the show.

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.

The children created pop art portraits of themselves by tracing over a digital picture on the computer. It certainly added something extra. At the end of the class, they couldn't believe that it was already playtime.

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

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?

A mistake people make when having portraits created is doing it themselves or having a friend click the shutter. Today's contemporary photographers are able to provide unique products such as portraits containing multiple images, hardcover coffee table books, computer-related presentations and more.

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

Your library is your portrait.

Dreams are like portraits; and we find they please because they are confessed resemblances.

Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.

They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.

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

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

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

It is easy to make a picture of someone and call it a portrait. The difficulty lies in making a picture that makes the viewer care about a stranger.

A good portrait is incredibly hard to create, there is too much temptation to pander to the individual rather than portray them as they really were

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

Photographers who come up with power never get accused of imitating anyone else even though they photograph the same broom, same street, same portraits.

All photographs are self-portraits.

Being a digital photographer I'm in awe of the older generation of photographers who created all those iconic cinematic style images on film, such as Man Ray's portrait of the photographer Lee Miller.

[Before each of numerous portrait sittings:] Now then, with teeth or without?

I was good friends with Frank Sinatra, I heard Steve Kaufman painting his portrait, so I asked Steve to paint my portrait.

I was hoping to do an impressionist painting, but I wanted a good likeness and I wanted to create a feeling of the lady as a person, as a human being rather than as a figurehead for the monarchy and a pomp-and-circumstance sort of formal portrait. I wanted more of a relaxed portrait.

Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.

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?

I happened to take a photo, and there was my wife, my dog and my banjo, all in the same shot - and I thought, "Oh, that's like a family portrait right there."

He sat by her, watching every gesture she made, as if he would paint her portrait afterward.

Cassius and Brutus were the more distinguished for that very circumstance that their portraits were absent. [Lat., Praefulgebant Cassius atque Brutus eo ipso, quod effigies eorum non videbantur.]

You will never see a portrait of my love, for miracles are never seen.

It's a fairly accurate portrait of me at eighteen, minus a few quirks like reckless driving and eating binges. It's accurate but it isn't profound.

When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.

The way someone who's being photographed presents himself to the camera, and the effect of the photographer's response on that presence, is what the making of a portrait is all about.

A portrait isn't a fact but an opinion - an occasion rather than a truth.

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.

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits.

But let's speak of art for a moment. Yes, art. I know a gentleman who makes excellent portraits. This gentleman is a camera.

A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.

This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.

If I declare it to be so, then this is a portrait.

I used to paint and I used to draw, and I probably would have loved to have been a portrait painter if I'd been good enough, but I really wasn't good enough.

To anyone who has served in Washington, there is something oddly familiar about [having your portrait painted]. First, you're painted into a corner, then you're hung out to dry and, finally, you're framed.

That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.

The Portrait of Dorian Grey' beautifully articulates how the altruistic part of ourselves clashes with our essentially narcissistic state.

I love signing autographs! Sometimes, when people ask me for one, I keep the photo for myself and frame it. It's a Win-Win situation really; I get an extra 25 dollars in my pocket AND another portrait for my bedroom.

It should be the aim of every photographer to make a single exposure that shows everything about the subject. I have been told that my portrait of Churchill is an example of this.

For me, a good portrait shows the fragility and humility of the person, and at the same time a strength, a resting in themselves.

Eloquence is a painting of thought; and thus those who, after having painted it, add something more, make a picture instead of a portrait.

Satan was a blunderer ... who made a stupendous failure. If he had succeeded, we should all have been worshipping him, and his portrait would have been more flattering.

I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are.

I believe I have had the most trouble with a portrait which I painted in installments - the head on one canvas and the bust on another.

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

When you start with a portrait and try to find pure form by abstracting more and more, you must end up with an egg.

Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

God sends experience to paint men's portraits.

One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person that one knows.

One is never satisfied with a portrait of persons whom one knows. That is why I have always pitied portraitists. One demands so seldom of others the impossible, but demands just that of the portraitists.

Our statute is a currency which we stamp with our own portrait.

Each person's work is always a portrait of himself.

And painted portraits have a life of their own that comes from deep in the soul of the painter and where the machine can't go.

Sometimes I spit on my mother's portrait for pleasure.