Quote

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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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
Process
Necessary
Dissatisfaction
Facts
Habit
Forming
Might
Creation
Retire
Great
Painting
Painted
Perhaps
Retiring
Becomes
Drives
Perfect
Painter
Insufficiency
Fact
Picture
Completion

More quotes by Lucian Freud

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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 must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.
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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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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My work is purely autobiographical... It is about myself and my surroundings.
Lucian Freud
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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.
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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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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The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh.
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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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 paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter
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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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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Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid.
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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The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable.
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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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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The only secret I can claim to have is concentration, and that's something that can't be taught.
Lucian Freud