Man cannot bear his own portrait. The image of his limits and his own determinacy exasperates him, drives him mad.
The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective.
I do portraits. I usually do live models in a class environment, but I've been painting at home more. I really love the human form, and I love faces. I've tried to do landscapes a few times.
The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.
You wouldn't take a portrait of a human being from a hundred feet away and expect to capture their spirit; you'd move in close.
He [William Merritt Chase] is, I suspect, getting a very truthful likeness. I would like it better if [it] was not so gray, so cramped about the eyes, and not quite so corpulent. But is this not quarreling with nature?
The people have to know what my portraits are like in order to behave in such a way that the result is one of my portraits.
When you do not like human beings, you cannot make good portraits.
You shouldn't need 60 full minutes to create a portrait that an audience doesn't forget. You should be able to make an impression that's lasting and resonant with one scene.
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.
It's a fairly accurate portrait of me at eighteen, minus a few quirks like reckless driving and eating binges. It's accurate but it isn't profound.
I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!
The smiling portrait of you is still hanging on my frowning wall.
A true portrait should, today and a hundred years from today, the Testimony of how this person looked and what kind of human being he was
As artists, are we quasi psychiatrists who mend the soul? Do we provide the consolations, escapes, and reassurances which enable us to survive? Or are we reporters of the truth, assembling the multiple shards of reality into intricate portraits which seek out the connections between misery and blessing, violence and wisdom? Do we protect or investigate the heart?
In a portrait, you always leave part of yourself behind.
Cassius and Brutus were the more distinguished for that very circumstance that their portraits were absent. [Lat. , Praefulgebant Cassius atque Brutus eo ipso, quod effigies eorum non videbantur. ]
God sends experience to paint men's portraits.
So, did I work with Warhol? I worked with him less on that play then I did on other things. He actually did a portrait of my rabbit and some other stuff. Warhol was definitely. . . Warhol.
[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits.