Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 3. Literature, Art, Beauty and Yoga
Section 2. On the Visual Arts
Problems of the Painter

Portrait Painting [2]

The failure to bring out the personality is not at all due to any defect in the technique. With any technique the personality can be brought out. But to get it one must come out from one’s own personality, one’s ego with its characteristic and limited look on things, and identify oneself with the person of the sitter — that is how one seizes it and can naturally bring it out in the painting.

14 December 1936