Quote

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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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
Anything
Picture
Never
Fronts
Would
Mere
Front
Wasn
Bits
Lying
Actually
Pointless

More quotes by 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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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
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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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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 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 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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Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid.
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 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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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 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
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The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable.
Lucian Freud
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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
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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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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
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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 character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art
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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A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.
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