I refer to what I do as 'conceptual portraits,' meaning that I come up with an idea or concept that I would like to explore, and then I find people that fit that idea.
Alix Smith
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.
Amor Towles
I want my portraits to create a space where blackness can breathe.
Amy Sherald
As soon as you put something to bed like the 'Women' book, you're never finished. There were portraits of people that I wanted to photograph - it's an endless subject.
Annie Leibovitz
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?
Arthur Quiller-Couch
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
I really respect fashion, but I don't follow trends to be honest, I'm much more into skateboarder style clothes, but I really like fashion photography, portraits, and stuff like that.
Brooklyn Beckham
Frankly, it's embarrassing to have a house filled with giant portraits of yourself.
Burt Reynolds
I used to always make art for girls. That was the thing I did for girls to like me. I did portraits, drawings, letters that formed outlines of significant things in our relationship. Art. I just used art in general. It usually worked.
Cary Fukunaga
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.
Chadwick Boseman
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.
Christy Turlington
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
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.
Neurologically, I'm a quadriplegic, so virtually everything about my work has been driven by my learning disabilities, which are quite severe, and my lack of facial recognition, which I'm sure is what drove me to paint portraits in the first place.
Everyone thinks these are self-portraits but they aren't meant to be. I just use myself as a model because I know I can push myself to extremes, make each shot as ugly or goofy or silly as possible.
Cindy Sherman
I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.
I wanted pretty pictures of older women - women who are trying too hard but succeeding - pulling off an extreme look. What I didn't know would creep into the portraits was a vulnerability behind the strong facade that most of them wear.
Painting self-portraits without clothes on has also given me some publicity.
Cleo Moore
'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.
Damien Hirst
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.
David Amram
I didn't try and do fashion pictures. I tried to do portraits of girls wearing dresses.
In music, they're not endlessly rewriting Beethoven's 'Third Symphony;' in visual art, they aren't painting portraits of 16th-century royalty. Art moves forward.
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.
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 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.
A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.
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.
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.
All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.
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.
In the '60s, I did many satirical portraits of dictators.
I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.
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.
For proper family portraits it's best to stick with classic, timeless looks that will not only be beautiful now but also in 20 years, and keep the wardrobe color palette similar so it looks like the group shot was well planned.
I really like doing portraits, but I like taking pictures of things that are natural, like scenery, too.
I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
I feel like vocals are to music what portraits are to painting. They're the humanity. Landscapes are good and fine, but at the end of the day everyone loves the Mona Lisa.
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.
I was born in the Golden West, reared in the arms of the Church, deluged with saints to draw from, and suckled on Italian art: my slates were covered from end to end with portraits of Savonarola, Fra Angelico, and Wild Bill and Sitting Bull; I knew all equally well and admired them about alike.
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.
I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.
When you do portraits professionally it's not a desire, it's for money.
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.
Memes can be visual. Our image of George Washington is a meme. We don't actually have any idea what George Washington looked like. There are so many different portraits of him, and they're all different. But we have an image in our head, and that image is propagated from one place to another, from one person to another.
My favorite exhibition of all time was at The Met years ago, called 'Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s.'
You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.
I have done only two portraits: one of the artist Francesco Clemente and another of Andy Warhol.
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!
Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age.
