The colours of this piece are mainly based around pale yellows and greens. The dog looks almost impatient yet at ease resting on its owner’s lap. The woman looks odd in her yellow dressing gown, revealing one breast… perhaps she was too nervous to be fully unclothed. In my opinion, the woman’s eyes seem slightly out of proportion and, while the rest of the portrait is in exceptional detail, this small thing throws the picture off balance. It really doesn’t look right to me. I admire his close attention to detail and shading in the rest of it and it’s an amazing painting, I wish I could work to the same standard he manages to create.
I feel that the colours of this portrait are warming in a homely kind of way, though this can make one feel like the image is welcoming, part of me feels like I’m almost intruding on this woman by looking at her in her home-like surroundings. Her quirky smile seems almost uncertain and perhaps a little nervous, which emphasises my previous idea of intrusion. I quite like this image really, but wonder why Lucian felt it necessary to have this woman exposing her breast.
His other portrait, “Leigh on a Green Sofa” is interesting. Though we can tell that ‘Leigh’ is obviously naked, I like how Lucian has cleverly covered him merely by how he is arranged on the sofa in a natural way, in fact, it almost looks as though he is sleeping. Everything has been covered, including his face. It is a little unusual to look at a portrait and not see a face, but I like it for this reason. I must admit that the sofa doesn’t look very green as described in the title; it seems like more of a cream. This makes me wonder if Lucian just hadn’t noticed that, away from the sofa he was painting, it didn’t hold much green or if he did it on purpose for the irony.
I like the way the paint has been applied to this piece. You can still see the brush strokes, yet it seems so detailed too. I like this technique and hope to be able to use it myself in time. It looks almost like he has painted and then lifted the paint off with a sharp object or perhaps even his finger nails.
Now, his portrait “Evening in the Studio” has all the things I know him to be famous for included in it. There is a naked woman lying across the floor, a dog on the bed (relating to the pet and owner pieces) and it looks like thick paint has been used in places. There is a vast amount of detail in this piece and, though I admire this, I can’t help wondering if there is any meaning behind this piece. I can’t understand the significance of having the one woman sat in the chair, fully clothed with a blanket on her lap, and the other strewn on the floor, completely naked. The walls, although a lovely use of colour, look rather grim for walls. The mismatches of colours show that the wall and possibly the rest of the house are in a bad condition. There is a lonely, hospital-looking bed randomly placed in the middle of the room with a dog lying on it, again, if there is a meaning, it’s hidden from me.
The woman on the floor, because of her size and how she is lying, has very interesting lines and shapes. I like how Freud has caught this in the shading of his painting. The woman have very similar hair in colour, length and style, apart from this and their skin colour, they share nothing else in common.
I am impressed with his detail in all his pieces of work, whether it is with delicate painting techniques or rather messy ones that don’t lose detail, they are both remarkable. As I mentioned before, I sometimes do not understand if there is a meaning behind the portraits or if he has painted these people in this manner and this posture simply because he liked the shapes it produces. He is a very talented painter and I can only hope to become as skilled in detail as he is.
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