Lucian Freud Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The only way I could work properly was by using the absolute maximum of observation and concentration that I could possible muster.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art

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.

Losing as much money as I can get hold of is an instant solution to my economic problems.

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

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.

I could never put anything into a picture that wasn't actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness.

If all the qualities which a painter took from the model for his picture were really taken, no person could be painted twice.

The only secret I can claim to have is concentration, and that's something that can't be taught.

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.

I have a timetable, but no routine.

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 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.

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

The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than is the picture. The process in fact is habit-forming

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.