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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

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

More quotes by Lucian Freud

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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
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The painter's obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work.
Lucian Freud
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When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.
Lucian Freud
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A painter's tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art.
Lucian Freud
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Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid.
Lucian Freud
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As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does
Lucian Freud
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The paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter
Lucian Freud
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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
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A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.
Lucian Freud
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Losing as much money as I can get hold of is an instant solution to my economic problems.
Lucian Freud
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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
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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
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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
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The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.
Lucian Freud
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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
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My work is purely autobiographical... It is about myself and my surroundings.
Lucian Freud
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The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable.
Lucian Freud
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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
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I work from the people that interest me, and that I care about, in rooms that I live in and know. I use the people to invent my pictures, and I can work more freely when they are there.
Lucian Freud
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The only secret I can claim to have is concentration, and that's something that can't be taught.
Lucian Freud