Top Portraits Quotes Collection

Discover a curated collection of Portraits quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category.

Image of Mark Kurlansky
A Wedding In Haiti is a great experience and its unaffected prose is as true a portrait of complex Haiti as you will find.
- Mark Kurlansky
Collection: Portraits
Image of Alfred Stieglitz
To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.
- Alfred Stieglitz
Collection: Portraits
Image of Helmut Newton
It's quite true that what I am aiming at, even when I take portraits, is to get a scandalous picture. I would love to be a paparazzo.
- Helmut Newton
Collection: Portraits
Image of John Singer Sargent
A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth.
- John Singer Sargent
Collection: Portraits
Image of Warren Christopher
To anyone who has served in Washington, there is something oddly familiar about [having your portrait painted]. First, you're painted into a corner, then you're hung out to dry and, finally, you're framed.
- Warren Christopher
Collection: Portraits
Image of Frank Stella
You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something - you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what Frank Stella said famously: What you see is what you see.
- Frank Stella
Collection: Portraits
Image of Anatole Broyard
The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
- Anatole Broyard
Collection: Portraits
Image of Tim Walker
I'm very particular who I work with. I'm not interested in portraying women with a cliched, generic look. I'm interested in a model who I can take a portrait of.
- Tim Walker
Collection: Portraits
Image of Sarah Ruhl
I used to paint and I used to draw, and I probably would have loved to have been a portrait painter if I'd been good enough, but I really wasn't good enough.
- Sarah Ruhl
Collection: Portraits
Image of Mary Ellen Mark
In a portrait, you always leave part of yourself behind.
- Mary Ellen Mark
Collection: Portraits
Image of Oliver Jeffers
I make figurative portraits as a way to explore theories of quantum physics.
- Oliver Jeffers
Collection: Portraits
Image of Dana Schutz
My paintings are loosely based on meta narratives. The pictures float in and out of pictorial genres. Still life's become personified, portraits become events, and landscapes become constructions. I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive.
- Dana Schutz
Collection: Portraits
Image of Francesco Clemente
My portraits are half what I see and the other half is invented or dictated by the person and the painting.
- Francesco Clemente
Collection: Portraits
Image of Francesco Clemente
That moment when the person actually dictates the way I do the portrait is when the intimacy arrives.
- Francesco Clemente
Collection: Portraits
Image of Hank Stuever
Jarecki's 'Reagan' is a compellingly watchable and appropriately conflicted portrait...artfully nuanced and intellectually curious.
- Hank Stuever
Collection: Portraits
Image of Byron York
A remarkably revealing portrait.
- Byron York
Collection: Portraits
Image of Lucian Freud
Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.
- Lucian Freud
Collection: Portraits
Image of Joaquin Sorolla
I do not care to paint portraits indoors. I cannot feel sympathetic.
- Joaquin Sorolla
Collection: Portraits
Image of Jamie Wyeth
Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.
- Jamie Wyeth
Collection: Portraits
Image of Jamie Wyeth
I'm an odd portrait painter in that I'm not just interested in human faces. I consider almost all of my paintings to be portraits.
- Jamie Wyeth
Collection: Portraits
Image of Jamie Wyeth
The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology.
- Jamie Wyeth
Collection: Portraits
Image of James Elkins
Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas. Paint is a cast made of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's body and thoughts.
- James Elkins
Collection: Portraits
Image of Giles Duley
When you are doing portraits, you have that intimacy with someone for a few minutes. For a really good portrait, you don't take the portrait - it's given.
- Giles Duley
Collection: Portraits
Image of Richard Avedon
A portrait isn't a fact but an opinion - an occasion rather than a truth.
- Richard Avedon
Collection: Portraits
Image of Yousuf Karsh
It should be the aim of every photographer to make a single exposure that shows everything about the subject. I have been told that my portrait of Churchill is an example of this.
- Yousuf Karsh
Collection: Portraits
Image of Robert Hughes
A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.
- Robert Hughes
Collection: Portraits
Image of Gisele Freund
When you do not like human beings, you cannot make good portraits.
- Gisele Freund
Collection: Portraits
Image of Michael Snow
Say you are doing a portrait and the face is perfectly done, but the rest of it is done in brushstrokes. That is sort of like what might happen in the films.
- Michael Snow
Collection: Portraits
Image of Peter Menzel
Pre-planning is essential. Research, research, research. If you are going to do a portrait, know as much as you can about the person beforehand. The web makes this very easy.
- Peter Menzel
Collection: Portraits
Image of Nicole Nielsen Horanyi
I find it rare to see truly complex portraits of women on film.
- Nicole Nielsen Horanyi
Collection: Portraits
Image of Carol Friedman
My days are kind of controlled by my projects, so sometimes they're album covers. Sometimes they're commission portrait shoots. Sometimes they are editorial, so it kind of - I don't dictate it.
- Carol Friedman
Collection: Portraits
Image of Jimmy Page
Every record is a portrait of the band at that time.
- Jimmy Page
Collection: Portraits
Image of Robert Rauschenberg
If I declare it to be so, then this is a portrait.
- Robert Rauschenberg
Collection: Portraits
Image of Minor White
Photographers who come up with power never get accused of imitating anyone else even though they photograph the same broom, same street, same portraits.
- Minor White
Collection: Portraits
Image of Maria Shriver
The Shriver Report presents an accurate and detailed portrait of American women and families at this transformational moment in our history.
- Maria Shriver
Collection: Portraits
Image of Walter J. Phillips
The portrait painter... If he insults his sitters his occupation is gone. Whether he paints the should instead of the features, or the latter with all its natural blemishes, he is as presumptuous as if he shouted, 'What a face. Hide it.' which would never do, although it is analogous to what landscape painters are doing every day.
- Walter J. Phillips
Collection: Portraits
Image of Gertrude Atherton
[Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.
- Gertrude Atherton
Collection: Portraits
Image of Jean Cocteau
We only serve as a model for the portrait of our fame.
- Jean Cocteau
Collection: Portraits
Image of George Eliot
Satan was a blunderer ... who made a stupendous failure. If he had succeeded, we should all have been worshipping him, and his portrait would have been more flattering.
- George Eliot
Collection: Portraits
Image of Oriana Fallaci
Listen: if I am a painter and I do your portrait, have I or haven't I the right to paint you as I want?
- Oriana Fallaci
Collection: Portraits
Image of Fyodor Dostoevsky
Such power!" Adelaida cried all at once, peering greedily at the portrait over her sister's shoulder. "Where? What power?" Lizaveta Prokofyevna asked sharply. "Such beauty has power," Adelaida said hotly. "You can overturn the world with such beauty.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Collection: Portraits
Image of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our statute is a currency which we stamp with our own portrait.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Collection: Portraits
Image of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
One is never satisfied with a portrait of persons whom one knows. That is why I have always pitied portraitists. One demands so seldom of others the impossible, but demands just that of the portraitists.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Collection: Portraits
Image of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person that one knows.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Collection: Portraits
Image of Ira Glass
Many times I see you as a portrait of torture.
- Ira Glass
Collection: Portraits
Image of Richard Avedon
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed
- Richard Avedon
Collection: Portraits
Image of Tanith Lee
He sat by her, watching every gesture she made, as if he would paint her portrait afterward.
- Tanith Lee
Collection: Portraits
Image of Aldo Leopold
The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.
- Aldo Leopold
Collection: Portraits
Image of Roland Barthes
Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
- Roland Barthes
Collection: Portraits