Lucian Grey Full Body Drawing
ASTONISHMENT, even cloy, oftentimes greeted Lucian Freud'southward paintings when they start appeared. In "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" a mountainous friend lay snoozing on a sofa, one blubbery breast cupped in a hand, revelling in rolls of fat like a beached whale. In "Naked Man with Rat" a surprised fellow fondled a rodent perilously near his engorged ballocks. Female nudes—sometimes the creative person's own grown-up daughters—lay rudely splayed, or tangled up in sheets. Bare flesh, vulnerable, cushiony, shiny, lumpish pink-white thickly shadowed in grayness and blue, was everywhere. The all-time painter in the world, as he was oft said to exist, seemed intent on rubbing the earth's nose in man ugliness. His candour was shocking.
What viewers did non always realise was that Mr Freud wanted to stupor himself. Each portrait was a hazard. Every time he approached a sitter—thrusting a piece of torn sheet into his belt as an frock, scraping a clean space on his heavily encrusted palette, knocking the dried paint off the tube-ends in a swipe across the wall—he felt, he said, like a diver on the edge of the board. He had no thought what would happen. As he loaded the castor with paint and made for the canvas, nervous and lithe, he was dicing with extraordinary danger, only as when, in younger days, he would shut his eyes and dash out into traffic to come across if he could make information technology, or when in poorer times he had hazarded all his money in gambling dens, deliberately staking every last penny and so walking dwelling house, springing with happiness, everything lost.
Each portrait had to depart utterly from the last, a surprise even to him. Each painting had to be better. Not necessarily "like" the subject—he did not ready much shop past likeness, only as he hated commissions and hackwork—only somehow being the person, live in the paint. Sittings for him took months and years, interspersed with witty conversations and dinners at the Wolseley in which he would go along on observing, translating each tic and expression into a single muttering brush-stroke—"Yes, a little," "Slightly," "More yellow," until, in laboriously fastidious layers, the person appeared. He was a beady-eyed prober, like the foxes he loved or his favourite whippet, Pluto, whose long-legged grace ofttimes appeared in his paintings as counterpoint to some fatter, redder human shape.
Queen and gangsters
His method reflected the draughtsman in him. The boy, transplanted at ten from Berlin to England, drew all the fourth dimension; the young artist, defying the 1940s scorn for figurative art, did work that was linear, apartment and infinitely detailed, with cross-hatched tailoring on his portraits and painstaking attention, worthy of Dürer, to the fur of expressionless monkeys and the tangled hair of his girlfriends. It all inverse, of a sudden, in 1959, with "Woman Smiling". From sitting down, he at present leapt to his anxiety; swapped thin sable brushes for hog-hair and fine canvases for rough; stopped drawing, went directly to paint, and overturned everything that had seemed to be Lucian Freud before. He refused to be predictable, just as he refused to exist influenced—for more than a painting or 2, at least—by any other creative person. He knew what he liked: Constable for his bold, thick paint, Courbet and Ingres for their pinkly voluptuous nudes. But his school was ever his own.
It was a school of interiors, centred on his studios in Paddington and The netherlands Park: bare floors, former rags in piles, worn armchairs and cast-iron beds. The but landscapes he noticed were window-views of houses and his own squalid gardens, full of buddleia, which he also painted. Through his door came an extraordinary mixture of people: drunks and gamblers from his underworld life, Kate Moss and Jerry Hall, Francis Salary and David Hockney (both friends), the Duchess of Devonshire and Lord Goodman, functioning artists and men with razor scars on their faces. The queen, on a velvet chair, perched among the rags for a grim, bluish-chinned portrait. Not everyone took their clothes off, but he wished they would. Fifty-fifty brand-up, even earrings spoiled that "Oh!" of the completely blank. He liked homo beings to be as naked as the horses he also painted, animals like them. He idea he painted them considerately, lovingly exploring the tones and the textures, any his detractors said. After all, they were by and large family or friends.
He himself remained intensely private. His studio numbers were unlisted and he moved effectually between them, refusing to exist tied to one place. There were many women, a couple of wives, myriad children, acknowledged in his paintings far more than than in his life. He moved in a fashionable set up and danced at the best clubs well into one-time historic period; the gossip-sheets chased him, but he refused to talk to them.
Every so often, though, he tried to confront himself. Information technology was unremarkably every bit a blurred face at the back of a painting, behind a huge plant, or casually in a paw mirror. He establish mirror-light odd and flat; he would squint in the paint, equally if it hurt him. But in 1993, in "Painter Working, Reflection", did he try something total-length and comprehensive. At 71 he faced the canvas, scrawny, grayness-naked, palette and brush in hand, with just a pair of unlaced hobnail boots on his feet. To guard against splinters, he explained. But also, most probably, to try to stupor himself with the truth.
This article appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition nether the headline "Lucian Freud"
Source: https://www.economist.com/obituary/2011/07/30/lucian-freud