Quote

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

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

More quotes by Lucian Freud

Image
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
Image
As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does
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
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
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
Image
The only secret I can claim to have is concentration, and that's something that can't be taught.
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
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 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
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
Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.
Lucian Freud
Image
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
Image
The paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter
Lucian Freud
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art
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 longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.
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