Words matter. These are the best Lucian Freud Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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 want paint to work as flesh.
The character of the artist doesn’t enter into the nature of the art.
I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them.
The picture is all he feels about it, all he thinks worth preserving of it, all he invests it with. If all the qualities which a painter took from the model for his picture were really taken, no person could be painted twice.
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.
A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.
The paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter.
Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid.
Whether it will convince or not, depends entirely on what it is in itself, what is there to be seen.
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.
Now that I know what I want, I don’t have to hold on to it quite so much.
Since the model he so faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture… it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model.
I never think about my style but just try and make the pictures look believable.
