Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud was a British painter born on December 8, 1922. Freud was talented since he was young but lived a troubled childhood. He went to different art schools and eventually burned down one of them. Although he was a troublemaker as a teenager, he managed to publish his drawings in Horizon Magazine. Freud is known to have been one of the best figurative painters. His paintings were of people that he knew such as friends, relatives and lovers. He never used anyone else because he thought that it would be telling a lie through his art. "I could never put anything into a picture that wasn't actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness." His style was very interesting and unique because of the way he viewed his art. He wanted to have a personal relationship with the person he was painting.
Freud was figurative and realist painter. He did not worry about what everyone else thought of his paintings. He wanted to show everyone else the type of relationship he had with his models. He was not trying to make his paintings aesthetically pleasing for everyone else because it wouldn’t show his feelings towards the model. In order to have some sort of relationship or tell a story, Freud only used acquaintances and family relatives. The position in which he painted them would sometimes indicate the relationship between Himself and the model. Freud had a very interesting painting style that changed over time. He started his paintings by being careful with his marks and was very precise. The layers of paint were thin when he first started his career. Later in his career, Freud started to use thicker layers of paint and bigger brush strokes. “From the late 1950s, when he began using a stiffer brush and moving paint in great swaths around the canvas, Mr. Freud’s nudes took on a new fleshiness and mass.” The use of thicker layers allowed Freud to give flesh a more realistic look while painting. During the painting process with a thicker brush, he would clean his brush after every stroke so that the there would be a variety of color.
“Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” (1995) is one of Freud’s most famous and expensive paintings. The painting is of an obese woman sleeping on a couch. It is a perfect example of how Freud made art without the intention of pleasing the audience. The person in the painting did not have the ideal body but she was important to Freud. The woman in the painting is Sue Tilly, a performance artist that Freud met through one of his friends. Freud developed a good relationship with Tilly during the paintings session. In an interview for a British journal, Tilly described Freud as being an interesting, funny and caring person. “I was always a bit jealous: he did exactly as he pleased. He was funny, miserable, horrible, kind, mean, generous, every character trait mixed up in one person.” Tilly’s side of the story showed how much Freud cared about the person he was working with. Freud must have been comfortable working with close people and therefore it may have been easier to work and create the wonderful paintings. “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” was one of the paintings in which he began to use his new technique of using a thicker brush and longer brush strokes. The end result of the painting was awesome. It had a lot of detail and there was a variety of color on the painting. It was realistic which helped accomplish Freud’s goals for painting.
Freud’s paintings meant a lot to him because of what they represented. His paintings of family member usually had deeper, personal meanings. The paintings would sometimes show how his relationship with the person was either working or going through some troubles. “Large Interior, Paddington” (1968) is a portrait of his daughter lying on the floor facing a growing plant. Her facial expression is neutral and was been painted to portray “Freud’s struggle to reconcile his family life with his work.” This painting is another example of how Freud was different from other painters and had his own unique style. The painting had a personal meaning and most people wouldn’t know the story behind it just by looking at the painting. Freud was able to accomplish his goals of developing a relationship with the model or in this case, trying to fix the relationship with his family. He showed the real side of his life and never tried to hide it using professional models for his paintings. Even though some of his paintings were not beautiful to most people, they were very successful. Freud was able create new techniques for painting and the results were very interesting.
Freud painted people regardless of their physical appearance. He wanted to show the truth in his paintings. I am trying to do a similar thing with a sculpture. I want to get away from the idealist body image and show people the reality of the obesity problem in the country. Freud was able to do that by painting overweight models because they were related to him. I can relate to the ongoing problem and therefore want to make a change by showing the problem to an audience. My intentions are similar to Freud’s with the exception that I don’t want to use a new technique for sculpting and the mediums are completely different.
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