Zitat des Tages über Porträts / Portraits:
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.
I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.
I have done only two portraits: one of the artist Francesco Clemente and another of Andy Warhol.
When you do portraits professionally it's not a desire, it's for money.
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.
Indeed, it is measure of how little we know about Cleopatra that the only images of her are either the coins she struck, bearing very unflattering official portraits of her, or some doubtful busts, which may be of other women imitating her coiffure.
You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.
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.
I do house things. I paint. I do portraits. I also paint my house.
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.
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.
People don't have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography.
All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.
The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.
I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
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.
To make money, I did portraits . The truth is so bizarre! I'm kind of embarrassed. I was like a 19th-century pirate painter. I'd say, 'Your mom would love a painting of you!' A salesman! I'd hawk paintings.
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.
What we know about Cleopatra's looks is based purely on her coin portraits. Engraving was imperfect, and that when you are a ruler and you ask for a coin to be engraved with your likeness on it, you are probably trying to project a certain air of authority.
I have always loved reading, so was interested in the literary world, and took many literary portraits.
I was going to have cosmetic surgery until I noticed that the doctor's office was full of portraits by Picasso.
My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.
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?
It's very difficult to take candid portraits of children because they're moving around all the time.
In the beginning, I started doing portraits of children, and of course, children have large eyes. For some reason, they just started getting bigger and bigger. Then, when I started painting imaginary children rather than real ones, they became bigger still.
Whatever China I'd been born into, I would probably still have become a painter - I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn't been under Maoist rule, I might never have become a writer.
Your aim as a photographer is to get a picture of that person that means something. Portraits aren't fantasies; they need to tell a truth.
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.
