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The Painter's Keys, a book by Robert Genn

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Freud Art Quotes - (47 quotes)

Anna Freud - From the Creativity category:

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training. (Anna Freud)

Anna Freud - From the Searching category:

I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time. (Anna Freud)

Lucian Freud - From the Abstraction category:

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real. (Lucian Freud)

Lucian Freud - From the Artists category:

The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art. Eliot said that art is the escape from personality. We know that Velazquez embezzled money from the Spanish court and wanted power and so on, but you can't see this in his art. (Lucian Freud)

Lucian Freud - From the Colour category:

Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid. (Lucian Freud)

Lucian Freud - From the Concentration category:

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

Lucian Freud - From the Desire category:

Now that I know what I want, I don't have to hold on to it quite so much. (Lucian Freud)

Lucian Freud - From the Difficulty category:

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. (Lucian Freud)

Lucian Freud - From the Dissatisfaction category:

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)

Lucian Freud - From the Dissatisfaction category:

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)

Lucian Freud - From the Emotion category:

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. (Lucian Freud)

Lucian Freud - From the Eroticism category:

The paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter. (Lucian Freud)

Lucian Freud - From the Ideas category:

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)

Lucian Freud - From the Improvisation category:

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)

Lucian Freud - From the Materials category:

As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does. (Lucian Freud)

Lucian Freud - From the Models category:

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. (Lucian Freud)

Lucian Freud - From the Models category:

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

Lucian Freud - From the Models category:

Since the model... is not going to be hung up next to the picture... it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy... The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement. (Lucian Freud)

Lucian Freud - From the Nudes category:

The problem with painting a nude... 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)

Lucian Freud - From the Nudes category:

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)

Lucian Freud - From the Observation category:

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)

Lucian Freud - From the Obsession category:

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

Lucian Freud - From the Painting category:

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

Lucian Freud - From the Portraiture category:

I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them. (Lucian Freud)

Lucian Freud - From the Portraiture category:

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. (Lucian Freud)

Lucian Freud - From the Portraiture category:

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. (Lucian Freud)

Lucian Freud - From the Purpose category:

The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable. (Lucian Freud)

Lucian Freud - From the Questions category:

What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince. (Lucian Freud)

Lucian Freud - From the Senses category:

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. (Lucian Freud)

Lucian Freud - From the Subject category:

Whether it will convince or not, depends entirely on what it is in itself, what is there to be seen. (Lucian Freud)

Lucian Freud - From the Taste category:

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. (Lucian Freud)

Lucian Freud - From the Truth category:

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)

Sigmund Freud - From the Burning category:

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. (Sigmund Freud)

Sigmund Freud - From the Choices category:

In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed by the deep inner needs of our nature. (Sigmund Freud)

Sigmund Freud - From the Complexity category:

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world. (Sigmund Freud)

Sigmund Freud - From the Curiosity category:

-on Leonardo da Vinci...
He transmuted his passion into inquisitiveness. (Sigmund Freud)

Sigmund Freud - From the Dreams category:

The dream unites the grossest contradictions, permits impossibilities, sets aside the knowledge that influences us by day, and exposes us as ethically and morally obtuse. (Sigmund Freud)

Sigmund Freud - From the Gender category:

The great question... which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'what does a woman want?' (Sigmund Freud)

Sigmund Freud - From the Health category:

Two hallmarks of a healthy life are the abilities to love and to work. Each requires imagination. (Sigmund Freud)

Sigmund Freud - From the Inspiration category:

When inspiration doesn't come, I go halfway to meet it. (Sigmund Freud)

Sigmund Freud - From the Intellect category:

The voice of intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. (Sigmund Freud)

Sigmund Freud - From the Love category:

All that matters is love and work. (Sigmund Freud)

Sigmund Freud - From the Mistakes category:

From error to error, one discovers the entire truth. (Sigmund Freud)

Sigmund Freud - From the Questions category:

All giving is asking, and all asking is an asking for love. (Sigmund Freud)

Sigmund Freud - From the Symbols category:

An overwhelming majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols. (Sigmund Freud)

Sigmund Freud - From the Temperament category:

I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador – an adventurer, if you want it translated – with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort. (Sigmund Freud)

Sigmund Freud - From the Wisdom category:

Just as a cautious businessman avoids tying up all his capital in one concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration. (Sigmund Freud)

Editor: Robert Genn

Consultants: Sara Genn, Richard Thompson
Technical Support and Presentation: Andrew Niculescu

Associate Editors:
Scott Altman, Bonnie Austin, Karen Austin, Michele Becker, Joe Blodgett, Norman Brown, Alyce Bryson, Leanne Cadden, Penny Duane, Max Elliot, Derek Franklin, Mardy Grothe, Harry Hartley, Sue Holland, Shawn Jackson, Sue Legault, Tammy McManus, Eric Mewhinney, Bruce Miller, Laura Parrish, Andrea Pratt, Dan Roberts, Shirley Rochon, Gilbert Roy, John Sherlock, Victor Wong,

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