Lucian Freud Quotes

As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does.

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.

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.

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.

The paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them.

The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh.

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.

Now that I know what I want, I don't have to hold on to it quite so much.

I never think about my style but just try and make the pictures look believable.

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

I want paint to work as flesh.

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.

An artist should appear in his work no more than God in nature. The man is nothing; the work is everything.

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

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.

The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement.

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.

It is through observation and perception of atmosphere that he [the artist] can register the feeling that he wishes his painting to give out.

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.

My work is purely autobiographical ... It is about myself and my surroundings.

You ask why I'm fascinated by the human figure? As a human animal, I am interested in some of my fellow animals: in their minds and bodies.