Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Live
Freely
Work
Invent
People
Pictures
Models
Rooms
Interest
Use
Care

More quotes by Lucian Freud

Image
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
Image
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
Image
The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.
Lucian Freud
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The only secret I can claim to have is concentration, and that's something that can't be taught.
Lucian Freud
Image
Sometimes, when I've been staring too hard, I've noticed that I could see the circumference of my own eye.
Lucian Freud
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
My work is purely autobiographical... It is about myself and my surroundings.
Lucian Freud
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Losing as much money as I can get hold of is an instant solution to my economic problems.
Lucian Freud
Image
The painter's obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work.
Lucian Freud
Image
The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement
Lucian Freud
Image
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
Image
A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.
Lucian Freud