Quote

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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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
Human
Paint
Humans
Drama
Always
Beginning
People
Create
Creative
Gestures
Tell
Simplest
Stories
Pictures
Wanted
Brought

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Losing as much money as I can get hold of is an instant solution to my economic problems.
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The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art
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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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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 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.
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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.
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The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.
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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.
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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 aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh.
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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.
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The paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter
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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.
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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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Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.
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My work is purely autobiographical... It is about myself and my surroundings.
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The painter's obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work.
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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.
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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