A Quote by Robert Dessaix

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.

Robert Dessaix

Quote Topics

About Art Autobiography Been Biography Form Like Literature Next Next Thing Portraiture Relationship Thing Thinking Will Writing

Quote Author

Robert Dessaix
Australian - Novelist
Born: February 17, 1944

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.

Kiki Smith

Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.

Vincent Van Gogh

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.

John Locke

The thing that's fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.

Imogen Cunningham

All art is self-portraiture.

Kehinde Wiley

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.

John Singer Sargent

When I'm painting and drawing I only do people. Acting is obviously portraiture - and writing is as well.

Antony Sher

It's very hard to find artists in the history of western art who don't make portraiture ideological in some way.

Hilton Als

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

Burton Silverman

A photographic close-up is perhaps the purest form of portraiture, creating a confrontation between the viewer and the subject that daily interaction makes impossible, or at least impolite.

Martin Schoeller

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.

Kehinde Wiley

I'm more interested in moving toward writing stories - thinking about the graphic novel form, and just something more long-form. I did a lot of literary translation in college. Translation is an art. But for sure writing has always been a part of how I think through my ideas.

Chitra Ganesh

Going to the Huntington gardens and libraries was radically important for me. They have one of the best collections of 18th- and 19th-century British portraiture that you can imagine in Southern California. One doesn't think about Southern California as being the capital of great art.

Kehinde Wiley

I have always hated biography, and more especially, autobiography. If biography, the writer invariably finds it necessary to plaster the subject with praises, flattery and adulation and to invest him with all the Christian graces. If autobiography, the same plan is followed, but the writer apologizes for it.