Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don't know.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I always found the concept of a tortured artist distasteful.
I was a terrible painter - my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso's demoiselles and the BBC test card clown.
The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.
When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.
An actress, around 40, on television, that's where you get the most torture, I think.
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.
I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist. It comes out of that Symbolist idea, back to Rimbaud and all that disordering of the senses and all of that being some exalted state. When I've been that way, I've always been less exalted than I would have liked.
I am drawn to intimate, often uncomfortable portraits of a woman persevering and awakening.
I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them.
I don't fall into the category of tortured artist. But it's not made me more or less anything.