Lucian Freud

“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.”

“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.”

“I want paint to work as flesh.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Now that I know what I want, I don't have to hold on to it quite so much.”

“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.”

“Whether it will convince or not, depends entirely on what it is in itself, what is there to be seen.”

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

“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.”

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

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