Quotes About Sitter

I think of something I read about Sargent: how in portraiture, Sargent always looked for the animal in the sitter (a tendency that, once I knew to look for it, I saw everywhere in his work: in the long foxy noses and pointed ears of Sargent's heiresses, in his rabbit-toothed intellectuals and leonine captains of industry, his plump, owl-faced children).

been a Sitter before

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.

I was Jackie's sitter and I was responsible for him. Sure I warned him. Sure he was being obnoxious. But the bottom line was he was injured and I was not supposed to let that happen.

All this BSC pressure was getting to me. I was forgetting how to be a good sitter. Or maybe I had never been one to begin with. Maybe that's why the club was falling apart. Maybe I needed to back off baby-sitting for a while. As I walked home, I felt about two inches tall.

I felt like a fool. A rotten sitter. Kristy the Careless. Everyone in town was going to see Jackie with his cane. Of course they would ask what happened and they'd find out the truth. He'd been left unsupervised by his sitter in his own backyard. If there were such things as sitting licenses, mine would be revoked.

Then again, perhaps the true subject of a portrait is the interchange between painter and subject – what the sitter consciously or unconsciously reveals, and the artist picks up. Out of the sittings comes, with luck, a new entity: a picture that succeeds and fails – that is, lives on in human memory or disappears – according to its power as a work of art. …

I've been criticised for pretty, smiley photographs, but at least someone is happy! In my mind, I am always giving the image to the sitter.

Among the things she said: Women seem to possess all the natural gifts essential to a good portraitist ... such as personality, patience and intuition. The sitter ought to be the predominating factor in a successful portrait. Men portraitist are apt to forget this; they are inclined to lose the sitter in a maze of technique luxuriating in the cleverness and beauty of their own medium.