The other Freud’s Mother

Many artists have done portraits of their mothers. Memorable portraits of mothers include Whistler's, Rembrandt’s, Ashile Gorky's and Picasso's. Many other examples also are there. Artist Lucian Freud’s (1922-2011) portraits of his mother are recent examples. There was a solo exhibition of Freud, in 2011 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. It was a retrospective of his 90 works; from his early portraits, done using 'zero number' brushes, to his last painting(2011) which was unfinished. Later in his career he started to use bigger hog-hair brushes to do larger works; all in oil on canvas.

After the death of Lucian Freud's father Ernest in 1970, his mother Lucie attempted suicide and she went into a bout of depression. Out of concern for her, Lucian began a daily ritual of having breakfast with her, followed by four-hour painting sessions. Lucian Freud had spent more than 4000 hours or six to seven years, portraying his own mother. In total, she had sat for more than 1000 times for nine portraits! I found this very heart warming.

His women have deep and melancholic eyes like in El Greco’s paintings. They all are intense in their emotions and thoughts. Most of their expressions have a very existential angst to them. They seem like they are looking through us. The wet eyes are glossed over with their interiors projected on to us. Sunlit windows are reflected in their pupils. They are depictions of the despairs, hopes and a wide range of complex emotions of the existential kind.

Lucian Freud was obsessed with the details of the bare body and skin than any other artist I can imagine. Facial features, body language and space around the main subject to show the associations in between, were all rendered in minute details. The finished work is very gripping with its tactile nature. But the 'real' may also feel 'unreal' when gazed longer and deeper enough. It is all about both the visible and the invisible.

He spoke about his models, most of them were his friends, “I would sit closely and stare. It would be uncomfortable to both of us. I was afraid that if I did not pay strict attention to every one of the things that attracted my eye the whole painting would fall apart. I did not want to be lazy about it.”

Nakedness of a human in Lucian’s paintings is just as the same natural nakedness of a dog or any other animal. He has done himself in nude and even his own grown up daughter’s. Here the 'conventional' perspectives of nudity, is transcended by his matured and dispassionate vision as an artist, I think.

In Lucian’s paintings of ‘the big Sue’, (Sue Tilley, one of his friends) his fascination with the tapestry of skin becomes more evident. Skin is like a cloak on our body. He is making us to look through the seven layers of skin, passing the veins, going through the flesh, deeper into the bones and entering into the essence. He talks about “predilection towards people of unusual or strange proportions. Its flesh without muscle and it has developed a different kind of texture through being such a weight bearing thing.” The paintings of ‘big Sue’ reminded me of a well-known pre-historic sculpture of the ‘Venus of Willendorf’. This is just my personal observation, may be not that relevant here.

He said, “I want paintings to feel like people. I want the paint to feel like flesh.” He has used thick layers of paint as if he was sculpting with it. The nakedness is transcended by his process, into something else. These are the kinds of new spaces into where Lucian Freud is transporting us.

___________________________________________________________________________

Venus of Willendorf is a 11 cm (4.3 in) high statue of a female figure estimated to have been made between 24,000 and 22,000 BCE. It was found in 1908 at a paleolithic site near Willendorf, a village in Austria. It is carved from an oolitic limestone that is not local to the area, and tinted with red ochre. The "Venus of Willendorf" is now in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria.[4]

-net resources.