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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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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
Subject
Subjects
Artist
Needs
Work
Obsession
Painter
Drive
More quotes by Lucian Freud
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
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.
Lucian Freud
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
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
My work is purely autobiographical... It is about myself and my surroundings.
Lucian Freud
The paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter
Lucian Freud
Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid.
Lucian Freud
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
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
The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement
Lucian Freud
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
The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable.
Lucian Freud
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
A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.
Lucian Freud
The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh.
Lucian Freud
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
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
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
The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art
Lucian Freud
As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does
Lucian Freud
