Portraits Quotes

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.

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

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.

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.

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

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

I collect old portraits. They're all just interesting pictures of people, and you just kind of wonder who they were and what they were. There's a guy - I don't know who he is, but he's wearing a suit. He's got his arms folded, and he looks like he sold insurance or something. I'm just wondering why someone painted him.

All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.

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.

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

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.

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.

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.

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.

You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.

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.

It has been difficult to hold onto many paintings but I have retained a few. Possibly the current favorite is titled 'Big Band' completed in 2005. It measures 13 feet x 9 feet. It has 18 nearly life size recognizable portraits of the biggest jazz stars that I knew and saw perform in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s and includes Wynton Marsalis.

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.

I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.

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.

When you do portraits professionally it's not a desire, it's for money.

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

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

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