Weird idea, because of course everyone who can see must be looking at things all the time. But we can 'look' without seeing, on the autopilot that Virginia Woolf calls 'non-being'. What I find inspiring about Lucian Freud, love him or hate him, is the intensity of his seeing, and the way he makes the human form loom up at you, more vivid and realised than the actual people looking at the paintings on the wall.
I don't find his work offensive, but affirming. The fact that most of his models are not conventionally beautiful is inspiring in itself. The (literally) cocky Leigh Bowery, bald head set magisterially on his bulbous torso; the artist's mother with her withered, fragile hands; Big Sue the benefits supervisor (above) spilling over a sofa like a pile of plump flesh cushions: these all made me realise that I spend a great deal of my life hating my own body, apologising for it, promising that it will be narrower, firmer, more controlled, in future. But it's really all I am, all I've got.
Really seeing, as well as looking, is a homage in itself. It doesn't matter if you depict your subject sympathetically or - as Freud does - forensically. This picture of his children, crowded together and yet all separate from one another, looks to me like a celebration of the strangeness of family life, and the ruthless self-absorption of childhood and adolescence.
How does this relate to writing? Ah, well. That's for anyone who wants to write to work out for themselves...
