Lucien Freud (1922 - )

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Interviewed by Michael Kimmelman in Portraits, 1998 (source)

"Art is by its nature wrought, however convincing it is. It has to do with artifice, which means an artist's ability to convey feelings that aren't necessarily ones the artist has himself; otherwise the most remarkable artists would also be the most virtuous and extraordinary people. I mean to say, 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 Velązquez embezzled money from the Spanish court and wanted power and so on, but you can't see this in his art."

"Normally I underplay facial expression when painting the figure, because I want expression to emerge through the body. I used to do only heads, but came to feel that I relied too much on the face. I want the head, as it were, to be more like another limb."

"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."

[On visiting the National Gallery in London]

"I use the gallery as if it were a doctor. I come for ideas and help -- to look at situations within paintings, rather than whole paintings. Often these situations have to do with arms and legs, so the medical analogy is actually right. Do you know the old story about the strip-cartoon writer who goes on holiday? He leaves his hero chained up at the bottom of the sea with an enormous shark advancing from the left and a huge octopus approaching. And the man who takes over the job can't figure out how to get the hero out of danger, and after several sleepless nights, he finally sends a telegram to the writer, asking him what to do. And the telegram comes back: 'With one tremendous bound the hero is free.' Well, when I come here I'm looking for ways to get myself out of troubles that are self-made."

Said to John Richardson and printed in Richardson's May 2000 article in Vanity Fair  magazine

"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... I don't want to have a type any more than I want to have habits. If I wanted to do the circus, I'd approach it differently."

I don't use professional models because they have been stared at so much that they have grown another skin. When they take their clothes off, they are not naked; their skin has become another form of clothing."

From an interview printed in Art Review, June 2002

"Painters who use life itself will eventually reveal every facet of their lives."

"I use people to make my pictures... For me, the painting is the person."

Artist notes from the Art Review article: Lucien Freud tends to work 8 to 9 months on each painting, usually only working with the sitter present. His sitters usually come once or twice a week for several hours, taking breaks every half-hour to hour. Freud uses hogs hair brushes, adds charcoal to his paint, and uses the toxic lead paint Kremnitz white.