Quote

My work is purely autobiographical... It is about myself and my surroundings.

Lucian Freud

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lucian Freud
Age: 88 †
Born: 1922
Born: December 8
Died: 2011
Died: July 20
Drawer
Graphic Artist
Illustrator
Painter
Printmaker
Berlin
Germany
Lucian Michael Freud
Lucien Freud
Lusyan Froid
Purely
Artist
Work
Autobiographical
Surroundings

More quotes by Lucian Freud

Image
A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then the painter realises that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope the picture might spring to life.
Lucian Freud
Image
I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong.
Lucian Freud
Image
I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.
Lucian Freud
Image
Sometimes, when I've been staring too hard, I've noticed that I could see the circumference of my own eye.
Lucian Freud
Image
The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for. A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt.
Lucian Freud
Image
The only secret I can claim to have is concentration, and that's something that can't be taught.
Lucian Freud
Image
I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do.
Lucian Freud
Image
Painting is sometimes like those recipes where you do all manner of elaborate things to a duck, and then end up putting it on one side and only using the skin.
Lucian Freud
Image
The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.
Lucian Freud
Image
Were it not for this [dissatisfaction], the perfect painting might be painted, on the completion of which the painter could retire. It is this great insufficiency that drives him on. The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than it is in the picture. The process is in fact habit-forming.
Lucian Freud
Image
The painter must give a completely free rein to any feeling or sensations he may have and reject nothing to which he is naturally drawn.
Lucian Freud
Image
I always felt that my work hadn't much to do with art my admirations for other art had very little room to show themselves in my work because I hoped that if I concentrated enough the intensity of scrutiny alone would force life into the pictures. I ignored the fact that art, after all, derives from art. Now I realize that this is the case.
Lucian Freud
Image
The paintings live because their creator has been passionately attentive to their theme, and his attention has left something for us to look at. It seems a sort of miracle.
Lucian Freud
Image
I could never put anything into a picture that wasn't actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness.
Lucian Freud
Image
If all the qualities which a painter took from the model for his picture were really taken, no person could be painted twice.
Lucian Freud
Image
The paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter
Lucian Freud
Image
As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does
Lucian Freud
Image
The painter's obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work.
Lucian Freud
Image
The painting is always done very much with [the model's] co-operation. The problem with painting a nude, of course, is that it deepens the transaction. You can scrap a painting of someone's face and it imperils the sitter's self-esteem less than scrapping a painting of the whole naked body.
Lucian Freud
Image
The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art. Eliot said that art is the escape from personality, which I think is right. We know that Velázquez embezzled money from the Spanish court and wanted power and so on, but you can't see this in his art.
Lucian Freud