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7 Lucian Freud Quotes

Lucian Freud's quotes feel like a quiet, honest look at how people really appear, perfect for anyone curious about true portraiture.

Lucian Freud quotes

  1. 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.

    #1

  2. My colour has no symbolic function whatever. I don't want any colour to be noticeable. I want the colour to be the colour of life, so that you would notice it as being irregular if it changed. I don't want it to operate in the modernist sense as colour, something independent. I don't want people to say, 'Oh, what was that red or that blue picture of yours, I've forgotten what it was.'

    #2

  3. When I look at a body I know it gives me choices 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.

    #3

  4. 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.

    #4

  5. URGENT SUBTLE CONCISE ROBUST

    #5

  6. I paint people not because of what they are like... but how they happen to be.

    #6

  7. I paint what I see, not what you hope that I see.

    #7