Lucian Freud Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If all the qualities which a painter took from the model for his picture were really taken, no person could be painted twice.
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The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh.
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I want paint to work as flesh... my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them ... As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The only way I could work properly was by using the absolute maximum of observation and concentration that I could possible muster.
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The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.
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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.
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The painter's obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work.
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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.
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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
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The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than is the picture. The process in fact is habit-forming
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The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement
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I use the gallery as if it were a doctor. I come for ideas and help - to look at situations within painting, rather than paintings.
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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.
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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.
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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
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The paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter
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The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art
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I have a timetable, but no routine.
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What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.
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A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.
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The only secret I can claim to have is concentration, and that's something that can't be taught.
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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.
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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.
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Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid.
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