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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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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
Objects
Motivational
Longer
Becomes
Art
Ironically
Look
Abstraction
Looks
Abstract
Real
Object

More quotes by Lucian Freud

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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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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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My work is purely autobiographical... It is about myself and my surroundings.
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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The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art
Lucian Freud
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The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable.
Lucian Freud
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The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement
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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Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.
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 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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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
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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
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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 only secret I can claim to have is concentration, and that's something that can't be taught.
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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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
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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