Creativity Quote by Lucian Freud

Freud isn’t chasing resemblance; he’s hunting presence. The provocation in “of the people, not like them” lands like a slap at polite portraiture, that upper-middlebrow tradition where the face gets laundered into “character” and the artist’s job is to flatter, or at least to recognize. Freud wants the opposite: not the social self the sitter performs, but the physical fact of them - the body as evidence, the skin as biography.

The syntax tightens the screw. “Not having a look of the sitter” rejects the easy checkpoint of likeness; “being them” swings for a more total claim, almost presumptuous, as if painting could occupy a person rather than depict one. That’s the subtext: portraiture as a kind of capture, intimate and slightly predatory, where attention becomes power. Freud’s long sittings, his forensic handling of flesh, his willingness to render people unheroically all feed this ambition. He’s not documenting how someone appears in a mirror; he’s constructing how they exist in a room, under light, under time, under scrutiny.

Context matters: postwar British art, suspicious of idealization, and a modernist lineage that had already broken the contract of mimesis. Freud keeps figuration but strips it of its consolations. His portraits don’t “represent” so much as insist. The sitter isn’t an image to be consumed; they’re a reality you have to endure, and in enduring it, you feel the artist’s stance: unsentimental, exacting, almost moral in its refusal to let surface stand in for truth.