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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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My work is purely autobiographical... It is about myself and my surroundings.
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A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.
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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.
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The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable.
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Sometimes, when I've been staring too hard, I've noticed that I could see the circumference of my own eye.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement
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I've always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It's people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories.
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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
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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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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
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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.
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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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Losing as much money as I can get hold of is an instant solution to my economic problems.
Lucian Freud
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Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.
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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The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art
Lucian Freud