Top 1200 Self Portrait Quotes & Sayings

I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.

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.

Balthazar Balsan is not a self-portrait. If he was, I'd have made the character more flattering.

The selfie era offers a big opening: everybody can do it; nowadays even five-year-olds know how to take a nude self-portrait.

Painting has always been a means of self-expression for me. Therefore, I paint because I have to and need to, not necessarily because I want to. Subconsciously or not, the figures I paint are a reflection of myself and whatever mood I am in at the time, so every painting is in essence a self-portrait.

An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.

When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.

The diagram of the house is a portrait of the family, a true portrait, whether it's sad or happy.

I was hoping to do an impressionist painting, but I wanted a good likeness and I wanted to create a feeling of the lady as a person, as a human being rather than as a figurehead for the monarchy and a pomp-and-circumstance sort of formal portrait. I wanted more of a relaxed portrait.

The portrait of a person is one of the most difficult things to do. It means you must almost bring the presence of that person photographed to other people in such a way that they don't have to know that person personally, but that they are still confronted with a human being that they won't forget. That's a portrait.

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.

When I draw my caricature self-portrait, I always do a huge smile.

I know Juffure was a British trading post and my portrait of the village bears no resemblance to the way it was. But the portrait I gave was true of nearly all the other villages in Gambia. I, we, need a place called Eden. My people need Pilgrim's Rock.

[My picture A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ] was a way of demonstrating that there was a broad range of possibilities and fairly unlimited utility for a black figure that didn't have to comprise its blackness in order to preserve a place in the field of representation.

Bodybuilding is an art, your body is the canvas, weights are your brush and nutrition is your paint. We all have the ability to turn a self portrait into a masterpiece.

My responsibility isn't to paint a flattering portrait; my responsibility is to paint a real portrait, a true portrait.

At the unveiling at the White House of the presidential portrait, President Bush pointed out that Hillary Clinton was the first sitting Senator in history to have her portrait hanging in the White House.

My first black-on-black picture was 'The Portrait of an Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self.' I started using it as an emblem of this undercurrent of wickedness, malevolence, and irony - all of that.

Tim Thornton's portrait of a pop culture obsession is so convincing that one can't help wishing that his fictional alt rock band actually existed, or suspecting that they did. The Alternative Hero is a weirdly compelling portrait of fanatic fandom which reads like High Fidelity at high volume.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow. Every job is a self portrait of the person who did it ... Autograph your work with excellence.

Along with some of the worst music of Bob Dylan's career ("Self-Portrait," 1970), this period produced some gems - including many songs recorded with The Band in '67 but not released until years later.

My work is a self-portrait of my mind, a prism of my convictions.

The self-portrait is an act of objectifying the self and in that regard is a unique form of portraiture.

There is no self-portrait of me.

I had been elected to the National Academy of Design in New York, and one of the requirements was that you give a portrait, a self-portrait of yourself.

The humor for me is how far above your head the signature is - it's dislocated from the sign of the artist in such a distinct way that it could almost be a self-portrait of a sort.

I'm not sure that is correct but I love that interpretation - that we artists never go out of self-portrait.

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.

I've heard many times that with all good artists it's ultimately a self-portrait even if it's an abstraction. I feel my work is very much who I am. I didn't try to make it that way; it just is. It reflects who I am and also my interests.

Taking photographs is generally an act of 'looking at the object, whereas 'being seen' or 'showing' is what is most interest to one who does a self-portrait...self-portraits deny not only photography itself but the 20th century as an era as well...an inevitable phenomenon at the end of the 20th century.

I was good friends with Frank Sinatra, I heard Steve Kaufman painting his portrait, so I asked Steve to paint my portrait.

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

I usually know when I take the picture. There's always some kind of un-self-conscious thing going on, so that it doesn't look like they're there for the sake of having their portrait taken.

When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a portrait painter. As I got to be older, I realized that as a portrait painter I wouldn't be able to support a goldfish.

I want people to understand that this is a very calibrated image [Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ], where point by point, very little is left to chance.

It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.

Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary.

People assume that a self-portrait is narcissistic and you're trying to reveal something about yourself: fantasies or autobiographical information. In fact, none of my work is about me or my private life.

The earth paints a portrait of the sun at dawn with sunflowers in bloom. Unhappy with the portrait, she erases it and paints it again and again.

Chess hasn't really influenced my literature. It's true, there's a character in Pigeon Post, an old chess player; but it's more of a wink, a self-portrait and not much more.

I have a lifetime project which consists of boxes and boxes filled with envelopes on which people have written my name. I've always thought of it as a kind of double portrait, and a portrait of our relationship, which in some cases means nothing. But it makes me feel connected.

If I have to make a self-portrait, I would put poetry and rebellion on the list. To be able to walk on a wire, to be able to juggle six hoops, you need focus, another word for tenacity, which is passion.

Yet each of us also carries another portrait with us, a picture far more important than any in our wallet. Psychologists have a name for it. They call that mental picture of ourselves, our self-image. ... there's always the person whose self-image is bent all out of shape, like a photo carried too long in a wallet.The good news of the tremendous worth we have in God's eyes can light up our inner self-portrait.

An act of naming should quite rightly enable me to call any-thing a self-portrait, not only any drawing, 'portrait' or not, but everything that happens to me, that I can affect, or that affects me.

Self-deceit is a most damaging trait. The remedy, for an artist, is to paint a self-portrait!

The mirror is the tool of the one who wants to do a self-portrait. And if you want to make a photo you need a mirror.

Obviously, we can see what was in front of the camera, but if a photograph is honestly made, it's a bit of a self-portrait. I think it's impossible for a photographer who is working honestly to keep this from happening.

One of the reasons why I love acting is my obsession with human emotion and faces and expressions - no surprise, then, that I usually end up painting faces. But I haven't done a self-portrait. I'd be too scared.

I've always felt the portrait is an occasion for marks to happen. I've never viewed the portrait as about the sitter. Even when I go to the National Portrait Gallery, I'm not thinking about the sitter; I'm thinking about how the artist chose that color or that highlight. It becomes about the time, place, and context.

I use the iPhone now for information. But with selfies, I don't know what those people are doing. It's like they believe what they see is real, even with the [filters]. And God bless them! But to me, it's not a self-portrait, it's a reality project.

Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author's self-projection.

The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world .

What I find really interesting is, whenever you see the person who gives you the portrait of yourself, the portrait seems to be a combination of their face and your face.

I'm at the age where I don't need an acid trip to feel naked... to feel that I don't exist. Now a self-portrait is almost a reminder to me that I do exist.

The reason that I'm an actor, or an artist, is ultimately because I'm trying to paint a self-portrait, and the most complete and beautiful self-portrait that you can.

A photographic portrait needs more collaboration between sitter and artist than a painted portrait.

I think that deprecation part is a very important aspect because when someone looks into themselves, if they're going to be honest, they're going to see parts that are humiliating as well as parts that they might feel really great about. Take Lucas Samaras again, who made a lot of self-portraits. He makes one self-portrait where he is looking directly into the camera and looks so intense and cool. He says in an interview, "I wanted to present the best version of myself."

Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing.

self-sacrifice is one of a woman's seven deadly sins (along with self-abuse, self-loathing, self-deception, self-pity, self-serving, and self-immolation).