Lottie Cushway
Interactive Media
Samantha Winnard
‘Complete an analytical review on the work of Lucian Freud’
Lucian Freud is very well regarded amongst other artists and began his work in the 1940’s where his earlier paintings were often created with thin paint and he would paint a range of subjects such as people, plants and animals in unusual positions. His first subject of paintings was his first wife Kitty where he would continuously paint her in an attempt to capture her true likeness. After a number of years painting Freud began to paint portraits, which were mostly of nude woman. When Freud painted the portraits it seemed that he only focused on the body and the background would often be very simple. There was a noticeable change in his style once he started focusing on portraits and he developed from painting with thin paint, which created very realistic images where he used a wide range of colours to then create paintings with a thicker paint to show visible brush strokes, and used muted colours to create more impressionist work.
This is one of his earliest paintings, which was made with oil on canvas and was created in 1947. The colours used in these earlier images are wider in range as you have the blue from her shirt. One similarity to both styles of his work is that although earlier images still use bolder colours I feel all the paintings contain this coldness about them that makes the paintings seem dark.
Freud also experimented with etching and has created a lot of portraits using this style. I like this image on the left because of how he has used the etching to make the shadows stand out more and I find the positioning of the woman very unusual as her face is disfigured. I find this style that he uses to be a very powerful technique and most of his images that have been created using etching are my favourite pieces by him. The self portrait below is another favourite of mine because of the wide use of colours on the face and the painting definitely grew on me when I copied the painting.
One thing that I certainly admire about Lucian Freud is how he is truthful to the appearance of the people he painted, if there were blemishes he would include them and in all of his self portraits he would never be flattering to himself. This unusual technique he has used in paintings is what has made him become so well known and requested by people, Freud has even had the honour of painting the Queen and although there was a lot of controversy on how he portrayed her I felt it was true to his style.
Lucian Freud is an artist that I would happily study and use for inspiration on my future work because I can relate to his style and techniques he uses.
Webliography
www.brain-juice.com
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