Elizabeth Peyton Quotes

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

My photographs don't do me justice - they just look like me.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

I love to draw people's faces. I do that all the time.

In a way, it's like the photographer always has his vision of me. The pictures that I'm known for are not really my image, they're always the photographer's vision of me. I can look a hundred different ways, but what people see of me in pictures is not really my image.

The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.

Is passion what we are? Is that what we are in pictures? Is what we are in pictures almost real? Maybe it's become the most real thing.

Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

The image is an image.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

The problem with doing [painting] Nixon is that if you make him look nice, he doesn’t look like Nixon anymore.

The Carrie Mae Weems photograph 'Blue Black Boy,' I thought, was fantastic.

I like to think of an image as different from a photo.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

The lens freezes time and space in what may be an optical slavery or, contrarily, the crystallization of meaning. The limits of the lens' vision are esthetically often a virtue.

I said the photograph isn't what was photographed, it's something else. It's about transformation. And that's what it is.

This is not a just image, this is just an image.

Obviously a drawing of a person is not a real person, but a drawing of a line is a real line.

The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect.

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.