After reading and posting to Richard Munro's thread about his being a paint slob, I thought I would start new thread on Lucien Freud and his studio. Freud's studio is quite an eye-opener.
Here is a picture of it.
Freud is 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.
I am reading a new book on Freud by Sebastian Smee, who is a great champion of Freud, and a sensitive and intelligent writer.
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