“I Want To Paint Myself To Death”

I think there’s a unique buzz one experiences when standing in front of paintings by an artist one admires which can’t quite be matched when viewing the same paintings online or in a publication. Its an immersive experience which takes on a 3 dimensional sensation even though one knows one is looking at a two dimensional image. Recently in December 2019 I went to visit the exhibition “Lucian Freud: Self Portraits” at the Royal Academy in London.

The first section introduced you to a selection of Freud’s drawings and my reaction was lukewarm; I was struck by the stylistic clumsiness of his proportional representation. There was a distortedness to facial features which irked me. Was it possible that this artist, one of the 20^th century greats, started out not being very skilled in drawing? If it was intentional, it didn’t work for me.

In 1948 at the age of 26, Freud’s self portrait drawing “Startled Man” depicts as described in a Guardian review, a man “open-mouthed and surprised, he draws himself with soft black crayon and pencil in a deceptively plain 1948 image. The caption talks about some Rembrandt etchings from 1630 and Courbet’s 1843 self-portrait The Desperate Man. “

Unlike Egon Schiele’s work. Now there distortion of the human form is clearly intentional, aggressively dismissive, and powerfully compelling.

A few years earlier in 1943 when Freud was 21 he painted “Man With A Feather”. In The Wall Street Journal article, this painting is described as having “surrealist hallmarks, such as the whimsical bird and figure in the background. But over time….Surrealism’s influence on Freud waned. “He only wanted to get his information from looking, and the more he looked, he felt he could never get enough information,” he said. “It was a way of always breaking down preconceived ideas—or how you think things are. But if you look and concentrate harder, something fresh might appear.”

From the same period, there’s a drawing “Man At Night”. Again proportions wrong, intentional distortion? Composition is questionable-there’s a diagonal cutting the image in half.

You then move into another room showcasing Freud’s oil self portraits. It feels like the floor shifts and you wonder if it was a corner you turned or rather a door you walked through, like the door into C.S.Lewis’ wardrobe. You look and you meet The Lion and the Witch, in the paintings.

If its the towering colossal haughty reservation of this painting, magnificent in its confidently unfinished and secretive abandon,

Or again, in this painting, incomplete, oblique, yet emotionally loaded, a face looking at you which was looking back at the subject in a mirror, these are self portraits whose expressions are designed to give nothing away and yet manage to speak volumes. I like that. I like that its enigmatic, not in your face, not plainly strumming the strings of melancholia or angst or whatever else occupied the artist’s mind. Yet its there; if you know about these deep seated feelings, you can instantly see them.

In 1993, the British painter Lucian Freud, who had just turned 70, took on one of the boldest projects of his career: producing a full-length portrait of himself in his birthday suit. He stood naked and painted in the top-floor London studio where he had spent so many of his waking hours. In the end, it is painting that mattered most. “I don’t want to retire,” he once said. “I want to paint myself to death.” And that’s more or less what he did: It wasn’t until two weeks before his death that he finally laid his brush to rest. (The New York Times)

Lucian Freud British Artist 1922-2011

Now there’s a punchy epitaph for you. I intend to make it mine too.

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious. Oscar Wilde