Top 40 Portraits Quotes

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

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

When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.

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

I wanted to translate from one flat surface to another. In fact, my learning disabilities controlled a lot of things. I don’t recognize faces, so I’m sure it’s what drove me to portraits in the first place.

I wasn’t thinking of a sequel when I finished ‘Life Class.’ What changed my mind was the perception that the characters had a lot of life left in them, a lot of unresolved conflicts, and also I became interested in the Tonks pastel portraits of facially disfigured soldiers and in the whole area of facial reconstruction.

Many billboards and magazine ads have resorted to showing isolated body parts rather than full-body portraits of models using or wearing products. This style of photography, known in the industry as abstract representation, allows the viewer to see himself in the advertisement, rather than the model.

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

There’s not a lot of pictorial evidence from the Highlands, because only the very wealthy had their portraits painted – but there is one well-known painting of the two sons of the Duke of Argyll, wearing tartan.

I am drawn to intimate, often uncomfortable portraits of a woman persevering and awakening.

‘Painting like a child’ isn’t a negative for me… it’s something only great artists can really achieve. The childlike quality of some of Picasso’s drawings is precisely what makes them so masterful and extraordinary; the ability to express complete visions, feelings and portraits through a continuous line.

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

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.

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!

Whatever China I’d been born into, I would probably still have become a painter – I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn’t been under Maoist rule, I might never have become a writer.

In March 2010, I attended an art opening for Kimberly Brooks’s show ‘The Stylist Project’ in Los Angeles. It was a starry celebration hosted by Dior and ‘Vanity Fair’ to benefit P.S. Arts. But even as fun-to-gape-at actresses like Christina Hendricks arrived, I couldn’t take my eyes off the oil portraits.

While I began writing ‘Rules of Civility’ in 2006, the genesis of the book dates back to the early 1990s, when I happened upon a copy of ‘Many Are Called,’ the collection of portraits that Walker Evans took on the New York City subways in the late 1930s with a hidden camera.

It’s almost embarrassing, but I do have one trick for taking portraits on commission. I carry one of these little bicycle horns in my pocket, and once in a while, when someone is sour-faced or stiff, I blow my horn. It sort of shatters the barriers. It’s silly, but it works.

I have always loved reading, so was interested in the literary world, and took many literary portraits.

There’s nothing more superficial to do than to paint a beautiful woman. The most beautiful portraits in art were of ugly women. If you paint Brigitte Bardot, it’s a disaster. Sunsets, you have to stay away from sunsets. You paint a sunset, you are in great danger.

Portraits of other great ones look down on you in your college halls; but while you are young and sit at the brief feast, what avails their serene gaze if it do not lift up your hearts and movingly persuade you to match your manhood to its inheritance?

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

I didn’t try and do fashion pictures. I tried to do portraits of girls wearing dresses.

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

Franz Kline, who became known for his black and white paintings, did a whole series of gorgeous landscapes and wonderful portraits that may still hang in Greenwich Village.

I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.

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.

When I was first exposed to the films of Ingmar Bergman, I found them frank and disturbing portraits of the world we live in, but that was not something that displeased me. They were beautiful. I thought people would respond to my plays the way I responded to Bergman’s films.

When I was painting portraits and – shall we say? – rather allegorical heads, which is the figurative work which immediately preceded the direction I have since gone, these images were always of a very fixed, rigid quality, and, of course, my work still has this aspect.

I really like doing portraits, but I like taking pictures of things that are natural, like scenery, too.

I’m quite a precious painter; my style is a messy fine art – sort of impressionist. I do portraits, I love painting other artists, but recently, I’ve been playing around with self portraits, putting on different characters.

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.

Portraits are about revealing aspects of an individual.

If I was in love with someone, I would get their picture out of the school yearbook and do portraits. If I was curious about sex, I would draw pictures of it. There were no books for me to look at. Then I would go find my father’s matches to burn the paper.

I still find doing portraits a terrific challenge, but even though I’ve done hundreds of them, I’ve never stopped questioning the very nature of portraiture because it deals exclusively with appearances. I’ve never believed people are what they look like and think it’s impossible to really know what people are.

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

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.

I thought I would draw or paint or be an architect. I was always drawing portraits. My mom put me in art classes in the summer.

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

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