Lucian Freud quotes

Lucian Freud was a British painter, renowned for his intense and psychologically penetrating portraits. His expressive brushwork and unflinching approach to the human form made him one of the most important figurative artists of the 20th century. He influenced generations of artists and left a powerful mark on the world of contemporary art. Here are 33 of his quotes:

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

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

Lucian Freud

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

Lucian Freud

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

Lucian Freud

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

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.

Lucian Freud

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

Lucian Freud

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."

Lucian Freud

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

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

Lucian Freud

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

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

Lucian Freud

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

Lucian Freud

URGENT SUBTLE CONCISE ROBUST.

Lucian Freud

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

And, since the model he faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture, since the picture is going to be there on its own, it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model.

Lucian Freud

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

A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.

Lucian Freud

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

Lucian Freud

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.

Lucian Freud

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.

Lucian Freud

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

Lucian Freud