Mon 15 Dec 2003
Lucian Freud
Filed in Artists |
“My work is purely autobiographical,…It is about myself and my surroundings. I work from people that interest me and that I care about, in rooms that I know… When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won’t. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.”
German-born British painter. He was born in Berlin, a grandson of Sigmund Freud, came to England with his parents in 1931, and acquired British nationality in 1939. His earliest love was drawing, and he began to work full time as an artist after being invalided out of the Merchant Navy in 1942. In 1951 his Interior at Paddington (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) won a prize at the Festival of Britain, and since then he has built up a formidable reputation as one of the most powerful contemporary figurative painters. Portraits and nudes are his specialities, often observed in arresting close-up. His early work was meticulously painted, so he has sometimes been described as a `Realist’ (or rather absurdly as a Superrealist), but the subjectivity and intensity of his work has always set him apart from the sober tradition characteristic of most British figurative art since the Second World War. In his later work (from the late 1950s) his handling became much broader.
“Art is by its nature wrought, however convincing it is. It has to do with artifice, which means an artist’s ability to convey feelings that aren’t necessarily ones the artist has himself; otherwise the most remarkable artists would also be the most virtuous and extraordinary people. I mean to say, the character of the artist doesn’t enter into the nature of the art. Eliot said that art is the escape from personality, which I think is right. We know that Velazquez embezzled money from the Spanish court and wanted power and so on, but you can’t see this in his art.”
“Normally I underplay facial expression when painting the figure, because I want expression to emerge through the body. I used to do only heads, but came to feel that I relied too much on the face. I want the head, as it were, to be more like another limb.”
“I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it’s what Yeats called the fascination with what’s difficult. I’m only trying to do what I can’t do.”
“I intend to paint myself to death.”
Lucian Freud
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Freud’s work is reaching peaks only very few painters have reached in their lifetime. One of the highest quoted leaving painter, his work ranges in the million of dollars. Lucian Freud unlike many other painters is able to talk about his own work and motives behind his art honestly and clearly. Mr. Freud understands human nature enough to stay true to his viewpoints when he works.