Home > Work > Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud
1 " Time is his luxury, and he is prepared to spend any amount that is necessary to get a picture right, which is another paradox, since by nature LF is packed with nervous energy and still apt, for example, to dive into traffic and sprint down the road in pursuit of a taxi. ‘All my patience’, he notes, ‘has gone into my work, leaving none for my life. "
― Martin Gayford , Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud
2 " But maybe ‘the brutality of fact’ isn’t a phrase that precisely suits what he does. Perhaps, ‘the awkwardness of truth’ would be nearer the mark. … "
3 " Then again, perhaps the true subject of a portrait is the interchange between painter and subject – what the sitter consciously or unconsciously reveals, and the artist picks up. Out of the sittings comes, with luck, a new entity: a picture that succeeds and fails – that is, lives on in human memory or disappears – according to its power as a work of art. … "
4 " Mental stamina is required too. All long-term projects require this ability to keep going after the first excitement, through periods of despondency. "
5 " Being able to draw well’, he goes on, ‘is the hardest thing – far harder than painting, as one can easily see from the fact that there are so few great draughtsmen compared to the number of great painters – Ingres, Degas, just a few. "
6 " Great British painters, one might say, imitate the proverbial behaviour of buses. None come along for a century or more, then two at the same time. In the decades after 1800 there were J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, then none of international consequence, except perhaps Walter Sickert, until Bacon and Freud after the Second World War. "
7 " I am only interested in art that is in some way concerned with truth. I could not care less whether it is abstract or what form it takes.’ … "
8 " What, then, is a portrait painter painting? An individual who persists though time, or merely the way a ceaselessly mutating human organism appears in a particular time and place? It is a good question. … "
9 " But then, perhaps when we contemplate one of these sculptures we are not really looking at the Pharaoh Sesostris or Senusret but, as LF put it, at humanity. Nearly "
10 " Then they say that they are taken out of this world, but I don’t want to be out of this world, I want to be absolutely in it, all of the time.’LF "
11 " But he was an extremely unaesthetic person. When you said that such and such was a beautiful work of art he seemed quite put out. He would say, “What do you mean? Prove it!”’ ‘Orwell "
12 " looks promising and I’ve taken it up again on occasion. But whenever I did, I realized why I’d not carried on in the first place – in the same way that a specialist might say of a child, that one’s not going to grow up right. I could tell that it wouldn’t develop into a finished picture. "
13 " the picture in order to move us must never merely remind us of life, but must acquire a life of its own, precisely in order to reflect life’. "
