Sitter Quotes

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. (Oscar Wilde)

What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it.

Aubrey Beardsley

We did an episode where she goes out to get a job and she gets fired because she's not good. They hire a babysitter to help out and she finds out she hates the fact that the kids have more fun with the sitter than her.

Patricia Heaton

What was the truth for the painters of yesterday is but a falsehood today. We declare, for instance, that a portrait must not like the sitter... To paint a human figure, you must not paint it; you must render its surrounding [aura-like] atmosphere. Space no longer exists... Who can still believe in the opacity of bodies, since our sharpened and multiplied sensibilities has already penetrated the obscure manifestations of mediums? Why should we forget in our creations the doubled power of our sight, capable of giving analogous to those of X-rays?

Umberto Boccioni

I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them.

Lucian Freud

Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means.

Marshall McLuhan

The artist who imagines that he puts his best into a portrait in order to produce something good, which will be a pleasure to the sitter and to himself, will have some bitter experiences.

Jacob Epstein

It'd be stupid for me to sit here and say that there aren't kids who look up to me, but my responsibility is not to them. I'm not a baby sitter.

Eminem

I try to photograph people's spirits and thoughts. As to the soul-taking by the photographer, I don't feel I take away, but rather that the sitter and I give to each other. It becomes an act of mutual participation.

Yousuf Karsh

TV is not a baby sitter.

Luis Guzman

Women may give lip service to wanting husbands who take on an equal role in raising children, but many will pull rank when an important decision, like how to discipline or what baby sitter to hire, has to be made. (Pepper Schwartz)

My job requires me to put on a little dress and run around the streets of New York in heels. But I also had the financial means to hire a yoga teacher to come to my house while my sitter watched the newborn. For 95 percent of the world, that's not realistic.

Sarah Jessica Parker

I've had cats all my life and obviously loved them, but the litter box, and the having to always get a house sitter, they're just too - they're too rigid. Cats are too needy somehow.

Martha Plimpton

All humanity inspires me. Every passer-by is my unconscious sitter; and as strange as it may seem, I really draw folk as I see them. Surely it is not my fault that they fall into certain lines and angles.

Aubrey Beardsley

The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter - 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites.

Chuck Close

I think I'm just generally more interested in figuration than abstraction. I think that painting abstraction often feels like painting colors to me, whereas portraits always feel like something connected. I like the exchange, the collaborative aspect of sitter and subject for sure.

Hilton Als

Ive been criticised for pretty, smiley photographs, but at least someone is happy! In my mind, I am always giving the image to the sitter.

Mario Testino