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Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.

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
Everything
Autobiographical
Portrait
Portraits

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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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
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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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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
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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 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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A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.
Lucian Freud
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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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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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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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My work is purely autobiographical... It is about myself and my surroundings.
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