Art & Creativity Quote by Lucian Freud

Freud frames ambition not as self-expression but as self-antagonism: the artist as someone who advances by picking fights with his own limitations. Invoking Francis Bacon is a sly act of positioning. Bacon’s claim that he gave art what it “previously lacked” is swagger disguised as diagnosis, a modernist bravado that treats painting like an emergency room. Freud admires the nerve, but he sidesteps the grandiose mission statement and replaces it with Yeats: “the fascination with what’s difficult.” That shift matters. It trades historical destiny for private compulsion, less manifesto than itch.

The subtext is a refusal of virtuosity-as-display. “I’m only trying to do what I can’t do” reads like humility, but it’s also an aesthetic program: difficulty as a filter that keeps sentimentality, easy style, and market-friendly repetition at bay. Freud’s portraits are famously unsparing; he isn’t chasing prettiness or likability, and this line explains why. If the goal is to paint what you already know how to paint, you end up with signatures and formulas. If the goal is what you can’t do, you’re forced into risk, slowness, and exposure, both of the sitter and the painter’s own inadequacy.

Contextually, it’s a mid-to-late 20th-century argument for painting’s seriousness after abstraction and spectacle have raised the stakes. Freud suggests the point isn’t to innovate loudly; it’s to wrestle quietly, to make the canvas a record of failed attempts that gradually become a kind of truth. Difficulty becomes an ethics.