A Quote by Kiki Smith
You start with a generic body, but I think the first wall you hit with portraiture is comprised of history and storytelling and the nature of characters - whether they are historical or coming from literature or documentation. Those are the references we have to people, besides your family, and the intimacy of portraiture is in the specifics of individuals. For me, it came out of doing things about animals.
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A form of art that I like is portraiture. I've been thinking about portraiture, and its relationship to writing and literature, biography and autobiography, and so that will be my next thing.
Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.
I hate to paint portraits! I hope never to paint another portrait in my life. Portraiture may be all right for a man in his youth, but after forty I believe that manual dexterity deserts one, and, besides, the color-sense is less acute. Youth can better stand the exactions of a personal kind that are inseparable from portraiture. I have had enough of it.
Beware how in making the portraiture thou breakest the pattern: for divinity maketh the love of ourselves the pattern; the love of our neighbours but the portraiture.
I have a really strong suspicion of the romantic nature of portraiture, the idea that you're telling some essential truth about the interior lives of your subject.
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.
My process for determining which eras I'd write about was to just read history books that gave a really broad overview of Chinese history. And when I came across a historical figure or a historical incident that was especially interesting to me, ideas for characters and stories would surface.
My work doesn't speak about individuals (it's not portraiture in the traditional sense), it tries to speak about life in general in cities of the West - which is where I live and what I understand.
What is portraiture? It's choice. It's the ability to position your body in the world for the world to celebrate you on your own terms.
You have to be very cautious about what you are doing for charity and things like that. I think you have to start with your life. I think that's what life is expecting you to do. In your family, in your surroundings, in your work life, in the people you're with, your relationships; how you behave and doing what you need to accomplish. That for me is being a hero every day of your life.
What it is is a type of editorialization, you know? This is self-portraiture. This is what you think about the world we live in.
I think sometimes when people get older they start to limit themselves and think that if they wanted to start singing or they wanted to start playing guitar or if they wanted to, I don't know...become an archeologist - whatever it is, they think they just can't do it anymore because they've hit a certain age and I just think that's like putting yourself in jail. I realised a couple of years ago that the more that I did and made things and created things that I could love; it helped me to realise that I was actually loving myself and what came out of me.
We have a lot of sort of received historical ways of viewing portraiture. And I suppose in some way I'm sort of questioning that by toying with the rules of the game.
It's very hard to find artists in the history of western art who don't make portraiture ideological in some way.
I think what's really interesting and useful about this question is that ultimately all art is a type of self-portraiture. And so in the act of identifying yourself, you're using others to get to that point. And so you're parsing out different aspects of different people in the world. You're choosing not only from America but increasingly globally different aspects of what's out there.
I basically enjoy doing films that are about something, that have complex roles that I can sink my teeth into. Basically, I gravitate to things that scare me. They might be things that I don't think I know how to play. I like trying to find within me where this character may exist. Whether is it is a fictional character or not I am not motivated by that. It is more about how challenging it is. It is just so happens that the more high profile things I have done have been historical characters.
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