Monday, June 16, 2008

More Fabulous Freud


























Another all time favorite of mine is Freud's early portrait of Francis Bacon, top pic. All those spheres...Bacon looks like a very sad Man in the Moon...

The 2nd image posted here is Freud's portrait of David Hockney. He and Hockney did portraits of each other at the same time a couple of years ago. (Speaking of this, I found a very interesting blogsite that is devoted to portraits, and "portrait parties." Check it out!)

The 3rd and 4th images are some of Freud's earlier works. They are more stylized and less painterly than his more recent paintings. In his portraits of Hockney and the Queen you can see a very thick application of paint, which is also visible in the two self-portraits posted here, the last two images. In the last image Freud seems to be disintegrating into and/or emerging from the pasty palette behind his head. He is made of the same stuff. Makes me think of something that I read about Van Gogh, and the saying "you are what you eat." I read that when Van Gogh was losing his mind, be began to eat his paints.

2 comments:

Susan Beauchemin said...

I like that one of the queen!!

Don Gray said...

That last Freud portrait makes me think of "The Portrait of Dorian Gray." Freud's use of paint as if it were human matter is unmatched. Like you, I love those early portraits as well. And some of his early, surreal ink drawings with collections of random objects. They look positively "Freudian" (as in Sigmund.)