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

Categorized in : Giving Doe Choices

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

real views art

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

ducks recipes skins

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

Lucian Freud

tasks purpose artist

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

Lucian Freud

real motivational art

The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh. The effect that they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell ... Therefore the painter must be as concerned with the air surrounding his subject as with the subject itself. It is through observation and perception of atmosphere that he can register the feeling that he wishes his painting to give out.

Lucian Freud

smell space air

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

ambitious giving-up morning

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.

Lucian Freud

creative drama people

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

Lucian Freud

artist flesh doe

What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.

Lucian Freud

seducing convince painting

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

spite paint people

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.

Lucian Freud

portraits doe people

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

Lucian Freud

significance emotional want

Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.

Lucian Freud

portraits

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

Lucian Freud

surroundings artist

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

Lucian Freud

auras artist flesh

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

perfect might facts

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

Lucian Freud

artist wish people

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

facts rooms art

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

independent emotional want

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

trying giving art