beautiful things: lucien freud (this is actually some kind of love affair)

I love Lucien Freud. I love that you can’t just look at a photograph of his work on a screen and have any idea of its impact in real life. I love that in reality, I can stand in front of a canvas of his for half-an hour and lose myself utterly in the loving detail applied to the crevice of an elbow, or a roughly sunburned shoulder. I love the ruddy knees and the folded flesh.

Lucien Freud, Leigh on a green sofa, 1993.

I love the way Freud paid attention to that which we have been taught to perceive as ugly, and so his paintings render it worthy of notice, and thereby of aesthetic value. I love that his work is in every big name collection, and so when someone says ‘fuck that’s ugly’ they have to stop and think about why it’s still worth looking at; I love art that worries at the idea that easily recognisable beauty is the only marker of aesthetic value.

Lucien Freud, Bella and Esther, 1988.

I know he’s critically popular. I know it’s not terribly cool to love something that everybody nods their heads at and proclaims brilliant. But every time I go to see my mother, I visit the Freud in her state gallery, and I stand in front of it for quarters of hours or longer at a time, and forget my feet and the person I came with and everything around me, and all I know is the texture of naked stomachs and rough hairy legs and red-burnt cheeks; which sounds, yes, entirely unattractive. But don’t you see, that’s the point. These are the parts of people that we are meant to gloss over and air-brush out – mentally, as well as literally – but here they are. Close enough to touch, every wiry inch brushed in deliberately, to goad us into really looking, and perceiving that beauty is not the black-and-white mathematically smooth construct we are taught to imagine. It can be so, so much more than that. It should be.

Lucien Freud, Night portrait, face down, 1999-2000.

And I love that something stuck on a wall in a high-and-mighty institution can make me forget where I am. If I could see the world like that, always, I think I would forget to do anything but look.

Lucien Freud, Ib and her husband, 1992.

If you’ve never seen one in real life, you should track down a handy gallery. Trust me. Even if you loathe it, it’ll be worth your time.

n.

why, fancy meeting you here.

What do you say after a long absence? An explanation of sorts is customary, I think.

So, 2011. I spent 6 months with no house, I (unintentionally) internet-detoxed, I found a home, I grew up a little bit, I got a tattoo (oh, the cliché), someone I loved, died (I grew up a whole lot more), I finished my degree, I designed a tattoo for someone important, I threw out half my wardrobe, I started to drag my life into some new kind of order, I did a lot of art, I got the internet again, and…oh, that’s about up to date, I think.

Of course it was more complicated than that. There was bliss and exhaustion; wrenching, unstoppable tears. Glitter-covered nights and gutter star-gazing (stars are always best admired sitting curb-side). Books full of scribbles and drawings and vast ideas; vaster plans. A lot of love and affection. Probably equal parts rage and angst. New skills, old skills. Tearing my hair out writing to deadlines (cutting my hair, dying my hair, deciding to stop cutting it). Tulle and coffee and beautiful books and Lucien Freud and kisses and melancholy and insterstate car trips and rent and heart-stopping boredom and days of painting and giving away shoes and too many cigarettes (and too little dancing, always too little dancing) and you know.

Life happened.

Albeit rather more dramatically than would have made last year, well, nice. It wasn’t nice at all. But it was…stunning, all-encompassed by an awareness of ending. It will always be the year I finished my studies, and the year S. died.

This year…this will be a year of working hard. Of beginnings and the getting done of things. And a lot of art. Mostly art, really. But I guess you wouldn’t be reading this blog if you weren’t into that sort of thing, now, would you?

n.

 (all photographs by me, c. 2012)