Aubrey Beardsley Quotes

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

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

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

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

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.

Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.

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.

You are to draw not reality, but the appearance of reality!

This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.

The more perfect the approximation to truth, the more perfect is art.

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.

It seems dangerous to be a portrait artist who does commissions for clients because everyone wants to be flattered, so they pose in such a way that there's nothing left of truth.

If nothing will finally survive of life besides what artists report of it, we have no right to report what we know to be lies.

Writing is not describing, painting is not depicting. Verisimilitude is merely an illusion.

All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object.

It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop

Every artist paints his Madonna according to his own pre-conceived ideas.

What is natural does not have to be a representation of something. I'm now working on a thing that is a reconstruction of a starry sky, and yet I'm making it without a given from nature. Someone who says he uses a theme from nature can be right, but also someone who says he uses nothing at all.

I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy.

Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.

Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.

I make the woman look at the camera as a symbol of all the eyes that will see the picture I am making.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

That's the thing about being an artist, you don't have to take anyone else's perspective into account. You can act as self-indulgent in your emotions as you want.