Quote

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

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
Art
Francis
Thought
Bacon
Remember
Previously
Giving
Fascination
Trying
Called
Would
Difficult
Artist
Yeats
Felt
Lacked

More quotes by Lucian Freud

Image
The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh.
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
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
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
The painter's obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work.
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
Losing as much money as I can get hold of is an instant solution to my economic problems.
Lucian Freud
Image
The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable.
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
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 longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.
Lucian Freud
Image
The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art
Lucian Freud
Image
The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement
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
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 paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter
Lucian Freud
Image
I don't want any colour to be noticeable... I don't want it to operate in the modernist sense as colour, something independent... Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid.
Lucian Freud
Image
It is the only point of getting up every morning: to paint, to make something good, to make something even better than before, not to give up, to compete, to be ambitious.
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