Lucian Freud Quotes About Painting

Quotes about: Painting

• 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

  Art, Real, Views

• 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, Skins, Recipes

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

  Lucian Freud

  Erotic, Elements, Matter

  Lucian Freud, Rolf Lauter, Jean Christophe Ammann, Craig Hartley, Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) (2001). “Lucian Freud: naked portraits : Werke der 40er bis 90er Jahre”, Hatje Cantz Publishers

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

  Lucian Freud

  Painting, Seducing, Convince

  National Gallery (Great Britain), Lucian Freud (1987). “The artist's eye: Lucian Freud : an exhibition of National Gallery Paintings selected by the artist 17 June - 16 August 1987”

• 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

  Giving, Choices, Doe

• 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

  Air, Smell, Space

• 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

  Thinking, Half, Painting

  Interview with Martin Gayford, Independent on Sunday, May 26, 2002.

• 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.

  Lucian Freud

  Self Esteem, Body, Faces

  Lucian Freud, Rolf Lauter, Jean Christophe Ammann, Craig Hartley, Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) (2001). “Lucian Freud: naked portraits : Werke der 40er bis 90er Jahre”, Hatje Cantz Publishers

• 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.

  Lucian Freud

  Miracle, Looks, Attention

• 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.

  Lucian Freud

  Art, Would Be, Use

  "Lucian Freud Paintings". Book by Robert Hughes, 1982.

• 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.

  Lucian Freud

  Art, Spring, Promise

• 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

• 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

  Artist, Giving, Choices

  Lucian Freud, Rolf Lauter, Jean Christophe Ammann, Craig Hartley, Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) (2001). “Lucian Freud: naked portraits : Werke der 40er bis 90er Jahre”, Hatje Cantz Publishers

• 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.

  Lucian Freud

  Ideas, Doctors, Use

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

  Lucian Freud

  Artist, Giving, Feelings

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