John Singer Sargent Quotes

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.

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!

There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.

You can't make a perfect painting. We can see perfection in our minds. But we can't make a perfect painting.

I don't paint women, I paint pictures. . . What I am after above all is expression. If in a portrait I put eyes, a nose, a mouth, there isn't much use; on the contrary it paralyses the imagination of the spectator, and obliges us to see the person in a certain way.

It is for the artist... in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.

Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.

I want paint to work as flesh... my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them ... As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does.

Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character.

I generally only paint people I know, I'm not a flatterer really.

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

Art is significant deformity.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.

When I draw a character, very often as I'm doing a face, my face mirrors the expression.

Sometimes art imitates life.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

The faces people make when they are photographed and the face they have when you draw them are very different.

I paint a slice of life, whatever it is that day.

You know, if one paints someone's portrait, one should not know him if possible.

A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.

Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don't get a photograph that I want to work from.

I don't really look like people in films; I look like people in paintings.

I think, for an artist, when you're drawing somebody who actually exists, it's a much steeper critical curve, as there is an actual representation of that person out there. You can't just interpret it any way you want.

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.