A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth. |
Color is an inborn gift, but appreciation of value is merely training of the eye, which everyone ought to be able to acquire. |
Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend. |
I do not judge, I only chronicle. |
I don't dig beneath the surface for things that don't appear before my own eyes. |
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. |
I have now got a bombproof shelter [the Continent] into which I retire when I sniff the coming portrait or its trajectory. |
Mine is the horny hand of toil. |
To work is to pray. |
You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh. |