Quotes About Art

That's why I like my job so much, cinema is a nation. I see on Twitter, there's people are calling themselves Portrait Nation. That's beautiful. To me, it's about campaigning for cinema, that's my commitment.

When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.

Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.

It is a serious job being a portrait photographer, which is how I saw myself.

I painted with my husband a portrait of a naked Serge Gainsbourg draped with a French flag, and it hangs in our bedroom. I love gritty and dark art like what the German couple Herakut does.

My earliest drawing is a supposed Carracci. It wasn't very expensive, I guess, because they don't know if it's a real Carracci. But it has all these seals on it of people who've owned it, and one of the great portrait painters of England, Reynolds, had owned it, so that's the earliest.

If I had gone to art college and everybody was being a conceptual artist, I probably would have wanted to be a portrait or landscape painter.

I want my portraits to create a space where blackness can breathe.

I've always loved those portraits that Alfred Stieglitz did of Georgia O'Keeffe over several years, which really convey the idea that there's not one image that can capture a woman, because we're changing all the time.

In the '60s, I did many satirical portraits of dictators.

I do house things. I paint. I do portraits. I also paint my house.

Frankly, it's embarrassing to have a house filled with giant portraits of yourself.

Fashion is where I make my living. I'm not knocking it; it's a pleasure to make a living that way. Then there's the deeper pleasure of doing my portraits.

A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.

That's what I paint, I paint people. They're portraits, but you won't always be pleased with the way you look in my paintings. Which is fine, I guess. Unless you're buying it, and it's of your kid!

In the beginning, I started doing portraits of children, and of course, children have large eyes. For some reason, they just started getting bigger and bigger. Then, when I started painting imaginary children rather than real ones, they became bigger still.

I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I have face blindness, and once a face is flattened out, I can remember it better.

As soon as you put something to bed like the 'Women' book, you're never finished. There were portraits of people that I wanted to photograph - it's an endless subject.

Many people see my early work simply as portraits of black and brown people. Really, it's an investigation of how we see those people and how they have been perceived over time.

My dad was a photographer, so we had all these studio portraits of us.

I've done 44 portraits of Obama because he's the 44th president.

I love movie musicals because I think there is an amount of emotional honesty that's needed to portray someone who feels so deeply that all they can do is break into song.

Freestyling helps me portray the emotion that I'm feeling right there instead of writing it at home and having to add to it.

How long will we show birds and bees in love scenes? The world has moved on and we should portray intimate scenes realistically.