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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.

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
Look
Creator
Looks
Miracle
Something
Painting
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Attention
Attentive
Left
Passionately
Seems
Paintings
Live
Theme

More quotes by 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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My work is purely autobiographical... It is about myself and my surroundings.
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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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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The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.
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 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 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 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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Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.
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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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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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.
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 character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art
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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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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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