I don't know if you've ever seen Lucien Freud's studio? It's walls and floor are grimly covered with paint and with rags for wiping brushes. Quite astonishing - but that's what you get, I think, for being completely focussed.
Here's a
link to an image of his studio with a portrait of David Hockney and David Hockney himself.
I have a friend from my university days who visited Lucien Freud in his studio at midnight one night in London (quite an appropriate time to be visiting the studio I think!). She commented too that she had never seen or imagined so many paint brushes in her life. He had boxes and boxes of paintbrushes in addition to all the used and soon-to-be-used paintbrushes in jars. Another example of his unwavering focus and vision.
Not a beautiful painter. His attitude is one of a workman. A sheer determination to get the work done. A steadily dogged searching for form and tone over months and years. No frivolities. No decoration. Not a polite conversational painter in the least. But he is certainly poetic, and his poetry lies in his gut-grabbing response to the tonal relationships of the human form. A response that is far beyond mere sensitivity. It is the thing on which he focuses all his religious and philosophical energies. Not at all a lovely painter, but I do feel, with recently renewed conviction, a very, very great one.
He didn't paint my friend (although she would have made a great Freud portrait) - she was only in London for about a week.
Threaded Mode
