Lucian Freud Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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 character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art. Eliot said that art is the escape from personality, which I think is right. We know that Velázquez embezzled money from the Spanish court and wanted power and so on, but you can't see this in his art.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I have a timetable, but no routine.

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.

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.

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.