Portraiture requires observation of the subject, not just as an inert and motionless living-statue, but also moving, speaking, reacting in all manner of moods and circumstances – some characteristics of the sitter’s everyday behaviour, some more exceptional. It is precisely those movements of the eyes, mouth and the mobile topography of the face that make an image like a person, rather than a waxwork.
Page 19
The portrait is a variety of art that has developed in Western art over five millennia since the age of the pyramids. Its subject is the individuality of a particular person: the sitter. So, in a sense, a portrait is all about the model. But, of course, it is also an expression of the mind, sensibility and skills of its creator: the artist. A picture of a person by Rembrandt or Velázquez reveals as much – or more – about them as it does about the seventeenth-century Dutch or Spanish person who happened to be the sitter.
Then again, perhaps the true subject of a portrait is the interchange between painter and subject – what the sitter consciously or unconsciously reveals, and the artist picks up. Out of the sittings comes, with luck, a new entity: a picture that succeeds and fails – that is, lives on in human memory or disappears – according to its power as a work of art.
Page 20
Sixty years ago, LF seemed to paint with a magnifying glass, which was a sign of the intensity of attention he was paying to his subject. Although his work has changed enormously over the years, that hasn’t altered.
Human models differ from eggs and shirts in lots of ways, of course, one being that they are conscious of the passage of time. And sitting for LF takes up a great deal of that….
Page 25
…the philosopher Derek Parfit argued in articles …there is really no such thing as a persisting individual identity. All that truly exists in our brains is connectedness – memories, character traits that persist through time, but more in some cases than others.
What then, is a portrait painter painting? an individual who persists through time, or merely the way a ceaselessly mutating human organism appears in a particular time and place? It’s a good question.
Page 42
The ancient Egyptians created the earliest great portraits to have survived. Perhaps that was the reason why Francis Bacon finally decided that they were the greatest artists of all. But there are thought-provoking features about carvings such as the sheikh el-Belad. One is that they were not intended for anyone to see, but were sealed up on the tomb of the subject. They were, in many cases, intended as substitutes, ‘alternative abodes for the spirit – the ka – of the deceased’. The disturbing notion of the portrait as an alter ego, a hidden twin – the Dorian Gray theme – seems to go back right to the beginning of portraiture.
Nearly half a century ago, in his 1954 Encounter article, LF wrote some words that suggest an exact likeness is not and cannot be the point of portraiture. ‘The artist who tries to serve nature is only an executive artist. And, since the model he has so faithfully copied is not going to be hung up next to the picture, since the picture is going to be there on its own, it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model’.
Page 48
‘Then [people using drugs] they say that they are taken out of this world, but I don’t want to be out of this world, I want to be absolutely in it, all of the time.’
LF quoted by Gayford.
Page 51
‘Now I know that the main point about painting is paint: that it is all about paint. To date, I’ve written three new sentences. I thought of one the other day, in a taxi. Writing is so enormously hard that I can’t understand how anyone can be a writer.
Page 54
The look or – as it becomes with added fixity and intensity – the stare is the most primitive and powerful part of any portrait. The eyes are the source of presence and power. They contain the force of an image of a god or saint, in the icons of the Orthodox Church for example. That is why so often those who do not wish to feel that force scratch out the eyes, leaving the rest of the picture intact.
The eyes, furthermore, in their subtle movements, the way they do or don’t meet our own gaze, the dilation of the pupils, are among the best clues we as human beings have to each other’s feelings. The pupils dilate if we look at something that interests or alarms us: men’s when shown a shark or a naked woman, women’s at the sight of a baby or a naked man. The eyes, through flickering and subtle movements, can express a range of emotions such as sadness and happiness, attention and inattention, desire and hate, trust and distrust, alertness and fatigue, falseness and sincerity, anger and forgiveness. Altogether it is not surprising that, with the appearance of the eyes – my eyes? – on the canvas, comes the impression that there are now three of us in the studio.
Page 64
“Don’t ask the driver….the driver doesn’t know where he’s going”
LF, quoted by Gayford, Page 65
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| Painter's Mother Resting I, 1976 |
I say: ‘I suppose that one actually is different from day to day. There would be different chemicals in your bloodstream and your cells would be slightly changed’.
LF responds: ‘And you will have been with different people and may well wake up in a different bed, perhaps with a new person. All these kinds of things can affect you’.
The paradox of portraiture, especially this marathon variety, is that the target is always a moving one. Physiologically, and psychologically, a living being is always in a state of flux. Moods shift, energy levels go up and down, the body itself slowly ages. Since the sittings began I have been to Texas, walked in the desert and returned with a slight tan and a buoyant mood.
Page 72
LF observes: ‘Likeness in a way isn’t the point, because whether or not a painting is a good likeness has nothing to do with its quality as a picture. For example, Rembrandts people all look alike in that they all have spiritual grandeur. You feel that he did not steer very close to the actual appearance of the sitters’.
Page 83
He continues on the theme of brushwork: ‘In a way I work the way I do because I can’t see what I’m doing. I decided long ago not to wear reading glasses when I painted, although I do when I make etchings because that is very close work. It’s only by stepping back that I can see what I’ve been painting, so it’s more like aiming at a target while I’m actually putting the paint on. But I’m sure if I wore glasses it would affect the way I paint. Also, I don’t use my left eye very much; I have something called a lazy eye, which was discovered too late to correct it. I’m right-eyed, which is often the case with people who are left-handed, like me. It’s a sort of compensation.
It strikes me that short-sightedness, and the need – or not – for glasses and other optical aids, is an underrated factor in the history of art. This suggests a new explanation for late style, the broadening and loosening of brush strokes, as in the works from the old age of Titian and Rembrandt, who’s splatters and dabs of pigment are sometimes astonishingly free. Surely both of them must have been long-sighted – as virtually everyone with normal vision is – by the time they reached their fifties. Conversely, the minute detail in the work of Van Eyck could only have been achieved with the use of a lens, perhaps a magnifying glass.
It is fact about LF’s paintings that they are done entirely by natural vision, his own idiosyncratic way of seeing. They are not seen through a lens; nor are they dependant in any way on the camera-eye view of the world – as many figurative paintings have been since the time of Daguerre, and more and more so today. Although LF admires the work of some photographers – Henri Cartier-Bresson, John Deakin – he feels the medium has little in it to help him as a painter. Photography, he says, provides a great deal of information about the fall of light, but not about anything else.
(There is more about L Freuds short or long sightedness, and how it affects his work on this page – also some observations by Gayford on how this may be apparent in later works by other past painters – could help)
Page 97
‘You are here’, he says firmly, ‘ to help it’ [the portrait]. The implication, surely correct, is that the portrait and its needs come first.
In 1954 LF wrote that ‘the picture in order to move us must never merely remind us of life’. This hints at one of the oldest feelings about figurative art, reflected in the myth of Pygmalion – the sculpture that stepped down from its plinth – and before that, those Egyptian statues waiting in the darkness of the tomb to receive the souls of the dead.
Page 108
“As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as the flesh does.”
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| Lucien Freud, John Minton, 1952, 40x25.4, Oil on Canvas, Royal College of Art |
A commonplace about portraiture is that the artist sees beyond the external appearance of the sitter, sees into their mind and – if there is such a thing – soul. I mention LF’s extraordinary portrait of the painter and illustrator John Minton (1952; p. 117), in which the sitter looks doomed, as though he is about to fall apart from emotional stress. Eventually, Minton also committed suicide. Photographs of him, however, reveal far less – almost none – of the inner tension and anxiety so apparent in LF’s painting.
Here is a case where the painter – or a painter such as LF who spends hours, months, even years observing his subject – quite naturally records vastly more information than a camera lens can see. It is thus a matter of accumulated experience: that is, memory. The reason why everyone sees differently is that each of us perceives s given sight from the vantage point of their own past thoughts and feelings. A painter can record this individual refraction of view in a lasting, public form; a picture.
Page 116
“A painter must see all that has been produced up to now as merely an aid to his own work.
Page 125
When we look at an artist’s work – the seventy-odd years of Picasso’s output, say, or titian’s – we are encountering not merely a lot of pictures, but an index of their vitality and tenacity, the rigour with which they continued to move and think and care about what they saw, day after day, year after year.
Page 129
LF tells the story of Augustus John’s son Casper who in later life became Admiral Sir Casper John and First Sea Lord. Someone once remarked to him on the contrast between his career in the Navy, and the rackety bohemian milieu of his father. ‘To be a painter’, answered Admiral John, ‘requires enormous discipline’. ‘I always thought’, says LF, ‘that an artist’s was the hardest life of all.’ Its rigour – not always apparent to an outside observer – is that an artist has to navigate forward into the unknown guided only by an internal sense of direction, keep up a set of standards which are imposed entirely from within, meanwhile maintaining faith that the task he or she has set him or herself is worth struggling constantly to achieve. This is all contrary to the notion of bohemian disorder.
Page 130
The picture is gaining some of my own sense of self.
Page 134
The idea the sitter has to be there while the painter fills in empty space around them might seem crazy, but it has a considerable amount of pedigree in the history of art. The late nineteenth-century sculptor Medardo Ross, for example – an artist very different from LF – though exactly the same. ‘In nature’, he wrote to a friend, ‘there are no limits, and there cannot be in a work of art. It should capture the atmosphere that surrounds the figures, the colour that animates it…When I do a portrait I cannot limit myself to the lines of the head since this head belongs to a body and exists in an environment that influences it: it is part of a whole that I cannot suppress.’
Medardo Rosso in a letter to Edmond Claris, quoted in Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism, London: Thames and Hudson, 1977, p. 27
This quote may have connections to Merleau-Ponty, and artists who depict themselves in the painting.
Page 137
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| Lucien Freud, David Hockney, 2003, 40.6x31.1. Private Collection |
Even in the short-term, painting is always a matter of memory…There is an interval, however short, between the observation and the act of painting, then another pause for consideration. During that time, the original sight has been passed through LF’s eyes, nervous system and mind, then he has contemplated in relation to all the other notations he has made. This process is repeated hundreds, indeed thousands of times. Thus a painted image, certainly one by LF, is different in nature from an instantaneous image such as a photograph. David Hockney puts it like this: the painting of him by LF has over a hundred hours ‘layered into it’, and with them innumerable visual sensations and thoughts.
Page 145
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| Add caption |
‘Picasso was a very small man, but finely proportioned so that he looked good. He was no more than 5 feet of 5’1”. I remember him talking about London, where he stayed after the First World War, in 1919. He complained that in London the men’s trousers were up to here, and he gestured at his chin level, and they might have been, just about. I was aware of how much his attitude to life was affected by his being so small. He would mention, for example, when talking about women, how big they were’. In fact, this does illuminate aspects of Picasso’s art: the looming female nudes, for example, and naked giantesses – massive and desirable.
Page 149 – view of the world affected by the size of the observers’ body in the world
This is an interesting demonstration of the effect the physical space of the studio has on the works of art that are made in it. There is often an expressive quality to the paintings that come out of the rather grand double Georgian room where I am posing. The heads he is talking about, from the early 1960’s, on the other hand, have an almost claustrophobic intimacy.
Page 178
The overall effect [of being painted] is more disconnecting than disconcerting. You are unusually conscious of the surface of yourself – the skin, the flesh, and consequently of what is inside the bubble: a mass of buzzing thoughts and sensations. It raises the question that occurs to everybody in childhood, and at intervals thereafter. What is this thing called ‘me’? That is of course the central enigma of portraiture.
Page 182
The living, individual quality of the ground is crucial to what he [Freud] does…Making the figure and its environment one organic whole in this way is the reverse of what Francis Bacon used to attck as ‘illustration’.
Page 188
Although painting is not usually considered a conceptual art, a great deal of what LF does during the sessions of painting is actually thinking. Each mark is pondered in advance, evaluated when it goes down, and if necessary altered or removed. This is, of course, part of the normal process. What is unusual about LF, perhaps, is his persistence in carrying on and on doing this – considering, changing, again and again – until the result satisfies him. That is the point of the extraordinarily prolonged gestation period for each picture. ‘The only secret’, he says, ‘I can claim to have is concentration, and that’s something that can’t be taught’.
Page 208
When one work ends, another begins, and if possible the minimum amount of time should be left in between. This is a good practice, psychologically, for anyone who’s work consists of a series of creative projects: it avoids the post-completion dip and the subsequent agonies of getting started again.
…it [Gayford’s finished portrait] feels like me. Indeed, I sympathise with another Freud sitter in the Jake Auerbach / Bill Feaver film who said the leg in the picture felt as if it were her leg.
This may connect to Earson’s experiments, and Ramachandrans ‘Mirror Neurones’.
Page 215
Man with a Blue Scarf is in part, I think, a painting of my own fascination with the whole process of being painted. I see that intensity of interest in the picture. It’s me looking at him looking at me. But as good pictures can be more than one thing at the same time, it also has a certain look of LF. Indeed, in David’s photograph – in which LF with his palette and brushes looks like a wizard beside the easel – the painting looming behind appears to have the same gimlet gaze and the craggily corrugated features as its creator.
‘Pictures and writings’, he [Gauguin] pointed out, ‘are portraits of their authors’. In other words, all works of art and literature reflect the minds that created them.
Also, Man With a Blue Scarf is the result of a meeting. There are many elements caught in this image: time, passing moods, feelings. It’s a record of all those hours of conversation, and of just silently being together in this room.
Page 216
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