"I want paint to work as flesh... my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them ... As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does." Lucian Freud started working full time as an artist in 1942 after his career in the merchant navy was short lived, he had only served for 3 months.
His impasto paintings and portraits are what have made Freud such an esteemed artist however his early work was more surrealism based, he used thin paint in this kind of work. He later changed his style to portraits and his impasto was much thicker then his early work, he excluded other styles and drifted away from the surrealism style and moved onto painting nudes, most of his renown came from his portraits of nude models. He preferred to use family members or close friends as it would make his paintings more intimate and emotion based. "The problem with painting a nude, of course, is that it deepens the transaction. You can scrap a painting of some one's face and it imperils the sitter's self-esteem less than scrapping a painting of the whole naked body."
He uses strong brush strokes and many thick layers of paints to define texture in his work, the way he paints makes the colours he use seem to merge and become a whole rather then singular patches of paint despite the fact he clears his brush after each stroke. I like Lucian Freud's work mostly because of the detail and textured look of his flesh filled images, you can see every blemish and spoil in the models he paints and sometimes himself. I think this is why he prefers to paint people he is familiar with not only because of the fact that the body and faces are known to him but also he is able to go into detail and depth of the person without really offending them, he has said when he is paying a model he doesn't get the same kind of response as they don't truly want to be there. "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."
He is an artist with a very unique style and overall look to his images, his work is easily recognisable.
Biography:
http://www.leninimports.com/lucian_freud_bio.html
Marion Boddy Evans - Lucian Freud Biography:
http://painting.about.com/od/famouspainters/p/bio_LucianFreud.htm
Sunday 27 February 2011
Sunday 13 February 2011
Jenny Saville
Jenny Saville's work left me feeling uneasy at first glance, there seemed to be mass amounts of paintings that looked like mangled lumps of flesh and in some cases blood but i was still captivated by the look of the images and how she had captured the fleshy realism of the subjects she had painted.
Jenny Saville is an artist who is known mainly for her large oil based paintings of naked women, however she doesn't conform to portraying today's 'ideal' figure, "I wasn't interested in admired or idealised beauty.", instead she paints obscure images of obese women in destorted and obscure positions, she captures the shape and contortions in her paintings incredibly well by painting layers upon layers with different tones and shades, this helps create a look of texture and depth to her images. She has never realy drifted away from her love of her favourite medium, oil on canvas, but she has tryed other ways to portray her fascination of skin and flesh such as photography, her images of naked bodies pressed on a sheet of glass to create a deformed shape really show the distance she will go to get a true in depth look at the human body and how it can bend and be altered. Jenny saville spent a short time observing the work of plastic surgeon Dr. Barry Martin Weintraub and this is where she got alot of the inspriation for her paintings and sketches of trauma victims and transgender patients.
Jenny Saville has incorperated her own life experiences into her work and created a style that is different and original, "When I was little, I'd go to school and be told what to do. And I'd do it, but it always annoyed me.". She was born in the 1970's and through the 1980's the body and how you portrayed yourself was a very important part of your day to day life, "Everyone was obsessed with the body - it was all about dieting, gym, the body beautiful.", this is why she tries to show that there is feeling and more to the body then just shape and she wants to capture as much emotion in her artwork as possible.
It was interesting to look at Jenny savilles work and compare her images to the ones we see in advertisments and mainly on television, i think she wants to show the reality of all different kinds of body shapes, genders and skin tones and not just one side of the human form that the media depicts.
Biography:
http://www.brain-juice.com/cgi-bin/show_bio.cgi?p_id=77
Interview by Suzie Mackenzie:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/oct/22/art.friezeartfair2005
Jenny Saville is an artist who is known mainly for her large oil based paintings of naked women, however she doesn't conform to portraying today's 'ideal' figure, "I wasn't interested in admired or idealised beauty.", instead she paints obscure images of obese women in destorted and obscure positions, she captures the shape and contortions in her paintings incredibly well by painting layers upon layers with different tones and shades, this helps create a look of texture and depth to her images. She has never realy drifted away from her love of her favourite medium, oil on canvas, but she has tryed other ways to portray her fascination of skin and flesh such as photography, her images of naked bodies pressed on a sheet of glass to create a deformed shape really show the distance she will go to get a true in depth look at the human body and how it can bend and be altered. Jenny saville spent a short time observing the work of plastic surgeon Dr. Barry Martin Weintraub and this is where she got alot of the inspriation for her paintings and sketches of trauma victims and transgender patients.
Jenny Saville has incorperated her own life experiences into her work and created a style that is different and original, "When I was little, I'd go to school and be told what to do. And I'd do it, but it always annoyed me.". She was born in the 1970's and through the 1980's the body and how you portrayed yourself was a very important part of your day to day life, "Everyone was obsessed with the body - it was all about dieting, gym, the body beautiful.", this is why she tries to show that there is feeling and more to the body then just shape and she wants to capture as much emotion in her artwork as possible.
It was interesting to look at Jenny savilles work and compare her images to the ones we see in advertisments and mainly on television, i think she wants to show the reality of all different kinds of body shapes, genders and skin tones and not just one side of the human form that the media depicts.
Biography:
http://www.brain-juice.com/cgi-bin/show_bio.cgi?p_id=77
Interview by Suzie Mackenzie:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/oct/22/art.friezeartfair2005
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