Lucian Freud Quotes

No art goes unmediated by other art.

Life imitates art -- but badly.

Perhaps the least cheering statement ever made on the subject of art is that life imitates it.

Art is the perpetual motion of illusion. The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for any one but inspire them?

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

It's art that's taught me to think and to write.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

I'm not an Abstraction Expressionist, but I think dedication to paintings comes from an early interest in that work.

If you think of any past artist, there was something that they looked at that inspired them to make their most famous pieces, whether it be the 'Mona Lisa' or 'Venus Rising.'

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

Warhol influenced me because of his writing. If I had never read his writings and interviews, I would never have understood his work.

All my art is in some way about other art, even if the other art is cartoons.

In the end nobody knows how it's done — how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.

Born of the sensibility, art sows and creates life in its turn.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

I come from an art history background. I studied at a master's degree level; I chose to dork out on art for much of my adult life. A lot of my heroes are artists and a lot of my musical heroes have an artistic side.

I really love art and I always have in every single different form and I just hope that I'm able to give some art that will touch some people and help them to be more positive and stronger.

The fine arts thing at college was always too much for me to think about. What I was more involved in was being successful at arts school.

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

In the end I'm in love with it [Western European easel painting]. And that's where a lot of the influence from the work comes from.

Art is wine and experience is the brandy we distill from it.

I liked working in advertising, but don't believe my taste in art, such as it is, was entirely formed by TV commercials. And I don't feel especially conflicted enjoying a Mantegna one day, a Carl Andre the next day and a brash student work the next.

You know, artists are influenced by other artists. We're all deeply influenced by what's around us; we don't make anything cold. Sometimes we think that we do. But within that, the most important part is that even though we're influenced, what are the levels of invention that we carry forth even as we've been influenced by something that's come before?

Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.