Artists Live and Die.
An Article by Graham A Hunter
We all have artists we love, and whenever a noted artist dies few of us who love art are left without feeling, or with nothing to say. We all like to read or talk about the life they led, the work they created, and the people they associated with, so when three die in close proximity then that really causes pause for thought.
Lucian Freud;
Freud led, by all accounts, what was quite an individual yet still bohemian existence.
Family aside, and even with his friends being quite influential, it still took many years of persistence and a dogged pursuit of excellence in the handling of paint to scale the heights of the English art establishment. Freud had his controversial episodes, just as say Francis Bacon did, but Freud’s very colourful existence was somewhat like his paintings, on one level calm and steady and on another free and spirited. Freud came late but quite rightly to be considered a colossus in the field of figurative painting, he initially struggled to convey the modernisms within his realistic portraiture, it was often considered less dynamic or ground breaking than Bacon, or Stanley Spencer, with whom he was often so unfairly compared, something he himself seemed to find baffling.
For me, Freud stroked away at conventional painting, slowly bending it to his will, transcended traditional technique whilst mastering it and bringing it to his submission. He climbed over accepted notions of portraits as mimicry or mirror images. There is nothing fusty or old hat about Freud, his paintings feel monumental. The sitters literally become the art, no need for title or announcement, here they are bold as brass bigger than life, stroke by stroke driven into being more than mere representations of human figures. Freud painted Icons as good as any by Andy Warhol; you may not grasp the name but you feel you should know it, do know it.
Freud will inform contemporary painting for many lifetimes to come, and whilst Spencer’s quirky canvases somehow less avant-garde, more English from another age like Wyndham Lewis or John Piper, Freud seems to grow more novel by the day a fact that may just have brought a smile to his lips.
