Portraiture is something that we're all drawn to. I think primarily other forms - we prefer, by and large, to look at human beings than a bowl of fruit.
Faces are the most interesting things we see; other people fascinate me, and the most interesting aspect of other people - the point where we go inside them - is the face. It tells all.
I've always had a good handle on drawing children.
When I can focus on something like guitar or painting, I do. I started painting people I admire, like Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Nelson Algren, Marlon Brando, Patti Smith, my girl, my kids.
For years, I've been painting black men as a way to respond to the reality of the streets. I've asked black men to show up in my studio in the clothes that they want to be wearing. And often times, those clothes would be the same trappings people would see on television and find menacing.
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.
I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.
When I draw my caricature self-portrait, I always do a huge smile.
A good painter is to paint two main things, men and the working of man's mind.
Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.
My father came from a Quaker family. His father was a professional artist who did portraits - very traditional, a lot of religious subjects.
In the late nineties, Katy Grannan began making haunting photographs of people who had extraordinary inner yens to be seen by strangers.
I don't know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs.
When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.
I'm related to the portrait painter George Romney.
If faces were not alike, we could not distinguish men from beasts; if they were not different, we could not tell one man from another.
Did you ever see a portrait of a great man without perceiving strong traits of pain and anxiety?
I'm an odd portrait painter in that I'm not just interested in human faces. I consider almost all of my paintings to be portraits.
I do not see in what way the face of a man should be a less interesting landscape than any other. A man, the physical person of a man, is a little world, like any other a country, with its towns, and suburbs.. ..As a rule what is needed in a portrait is a great deal of the general, and very little of the particular.
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.
Looking into my future, I don't always want to be in front of the camera. I want to be behind the camera and bring to life those family members of mine or people that I knew or the kids I grew up. I want people to know the different facets of black people, brown people, all people.
One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person that one knows.
It is a serious job being a portrait photographer, which is how I saw myself.
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.
A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.
