21 Lucian Freud Quotes

Lucian Freud quotes

1. 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.

2. My colour has no symbolic function whatever. I don't want any colour to be noticeable. I want the colour to be the colour of life, so that you would notice it as being irregular if it changed. I don't want it to operate in the modernist sense as colour, something independent. I don't want people to say, 'Oh, what was that red or that blue picture of yours, I've forgotten what it was.'

3. When I look at a body I know it gives me choices 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.

4. 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.

5. URGENT SUBTLE CONCISE ROBUST

6. I paint people not because of what they are like... but how they happen to be.

7. I paint what I see, not what you hope that I see.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. Since the model he so faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture... it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model.

4. I have a timetable, but no routine.

5. 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.

6. Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid.

7. Sometimes, when I've been staring too hard, I've noticed that I could see the circumference of my own eye.

8. The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable.

9. 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.

10. I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen... that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it.

11. 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.

12. The painter's obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work.

13. I have a hatred of habit and routine. And what dogs love is just that. They like regular everything, and I don't have regular anything. I have a timetable, but no routine.

14. 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.