Quotes About Portraits

In the past there were too many portraits of Chairman Mao in China. They were hung everywhere. That was not proper and it didn't really show respect for Chairman Mao.

I was going to have cosmetic surgery until I noticed that the doctor's office was full of portraits by Picasso.

If we accord importance to the kind of portraits which surround us, it is because we fashion our lives according to their example, accepting aspects of ourselves if they concur with what others mention of themselves.

and when Mrs Thatcher came to the college for a scientific symposium Tyson was deputed to take her round the Common Room. This is hung with portraits and photographs of dead fellows, including one of the economist G. D. H. Cole. Tyson planned to take Mrs Thatcher up to it saying, 'And this, Prime Minister, is a former fellow, G. D. H. Dole.' Whereupon, with luck, Mrs Thatcher would have had to say, 'Cole not Dole.' In the event he did take her round but lost his nerve.

Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age.

I think I'm just generally more interested in figuration than abstraction. I think that painting abstraction often feels like painting colors to me, whereas portraits always feel like something connected. I like the exchange, the collaborative aspect of sitter and subject for sure.

People don't have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography.

The suspect nature of these stories can be seen in the anecdote Jefferson told of Hamilton visiting his lodging in 1792 and inquiring about three portraits on the wall. "They are my trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced," Jefferson replied: "Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Locke." Hamilton supposedly replied, "The greatest man that ever lived was Julius Casar.

The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.

When you do portraits professionally it's not a desire, it's for money.

She stood looking carefully at the labeled portraits Ursala had put up: Little Crow, Chief of the Santees, Geronimo, last of the Apaches, and Ursala's favorite, Big Foot, dying in the snow at Wounded Knee. Isn't that where the massacre was? asked Ellen. Yes. I'm going to go there when I'm grown up. To Wounded Knee. That seems sensible, said Ellen.

The growth of intimacy is like that. First one gives off his best picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humor. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and a third--before long the best lines cancel out--and the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the pictures have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture.

There were two round photographs of an old man and woman with collapsed mouths and another picture of a man whose eyebrows dashed out of two bushes of hair and clashed in a heap on the bridge of his nose; the rest of his face stuck out like a bare cliff to fall from.

The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter - 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites.

I was a terrible painter - my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso's demoiselles and the BBC test card clown.

The number of portraits one saw of [Emperor Franz Joseph] was almost as great as the number of inhabitants of his realms…. Believing in his existence was rather like seeing certain stars although they ceased to exist thousands of years ago.

Authors Note: This is a sketchbook, a collection of my impressions of Iran and its people. For the most part, I have painted situations as they occurred, present voices as precisely as possible. At times, I have made collages of stories and faces, as often to protect the identities of people as to lend artistry to a scene. As is the case with many portraits, their truth is not in their detail, but their spirit.

When I first came to America there still was Look Magazine and LIFE Magazine, and the photography in those magazines was amazing to look at. They had the best portraits, and their news photography.

What we know about Cleopatra's looks is based purely on her coin portraits. Engraving was imperfect, and that when you are a ruler and you ask for a coin to be engraved with your likeness on it, you are probably trying to project a certain air of authority.

she suddenly looks different to Olympia, physically different, as though a portrait has been alterred. And Olympia thinks that possibly such adjustments might have to be made for everyone she knows. Upon meeting a person, a sketch is formed, and for the life of the relationship, however intimate or not, a portrait is painted, with oils or pastels or with black ink or with watercolor, and only at a persons's death can the portraits be considered finished. Perhaps not even at the person's death.

We are never content with portraits of people we know. For that reason I have always felt sorry for portrait painters. We rarely ask the impossible of anyone, but of them we do. They are required to get everybody's relationship with the subject, everybody's affection or dislike, into the picture; and not merely represent their own view of a person but what everybody else's might be too.

The thing is, when you take photographs, you meet a lot of people but you don't actually know anybody. It is very quick, in and out, in a concentrated way.

The public persona that Kahlo presented in interviews and in her meticulously staged photographic portraits is substantially different from 'the many Fridas' we encounter when reading her private letters, carefully studying her diary or analysing the profound and complex art she created. Contradictions abound.

I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them.