Quotes and Sayings about Portraits
"My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph."
- Richard Avedon
(Related: People, Portraits)
"I paint German artists whom I admire. I paint their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits too. But oddly enough, each of these portraits ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair. I myself have never been able to work out why this happens."
- Georg Baselitz
(Related: Work, Artists, Hair, Portraits, Woman)
"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."
- Chuck Close
(Related: Faces, Fact, First, Learning, Portraits)
"Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don't know."
- Imogen Cunningham
(Related: Living, Portraits)
"When you do portraits professionally it's not a desire, it's for money."
- Imogen Cunningham
(Related: Money, Desire, Portraits)
"I do house things. I paint. I do portraits. I also paint my house."
- Willa Ford
(Related: Portraits)
"I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them."
- Lucian Freud
(Related: People, Being, Portraits)
"I have always loved reading, so was interested in the literary world, and took many literary portraits."
- Fay Godwin
(Related: Literary, Portraits, Reading, World)
"I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits."
- Howard Hodgkin
(Related: Artists, Portraits)
"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."
- Billy Joel
(Related: Art, Music, Portraits, Sense)
"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."
- Lynn Johnston
(Related: Love, Sex, Father, Books, Portraits, School)
"I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best."
- Frida Kahlo
(Related: Self)
"There is nothing that special to see when looking at me. I'm a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening - figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits."
- Gustav Klimt
(Related: Day, Evening, Nothing, Portraits)
"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."
- Lewis H. Lapham
(Related: Art, Wealth, Tax, Living, Portraits, Thinking)
"The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature."
- Thomas B. Macaulay
(Related: Portraits)
"People don't have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography."
- Robert Mapplethorpe
(Related: Money, Time, People, Photography, Portraits)
"Painting self-portraits without clothes on has also given me some publicity."
- Cleo Moore
(Related: Clothes, Painting, Publicity, Self)
"A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself."
- Edvard Munch
(Related: Portraits)
"You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall."
- Jawaharlal Nehru
(Related: Change, History, Faces, Portraits)
"I was going to have cosmetic surgery until I noticed that the doctor's office was full of portraits by Picasso."
- Rita Rudner
(Related: Office, Portraits)
"I often concentrate on the eyes and lips, they are great indicators of mood and feeling, and I find that I can project character into my portraits by bringing the viewer's attention to these areas."
- Robert Ryan
(Related: Character, Attention, Eyes, Feeling, Portraits, Project)
"I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed."
- Gertrude Stein
(Related: Portraits, Writers)
"You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland's history in their lineaments trace; think where man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends."
- William Butler Yeats
(Related: History, Friends, Glory, Ireland, Man, Portraits)