In his etchings, Lucian Freud uses the body’s underlying bone structure as a typological marker or foci to distribute rhythmic, darting, and calculated lines. These lines describe his encounters with specific human beings, their bodies and psyches. Freud’s etchings are built upon reiterations, repeated articulations of contours, which lead to meticulous descriptions of tonal values and surfaces. The artist creates shadows, wrinkles and other bodily asymmetries, through a repetitious analysis of contours and protuberances. The reiterations of outlines, often found where the outer edges of the head, limbs, and torso meet the void or background and not easy to make out when the etchings are viewed from a distance, attest to the artists belief that you never see the same thing the same way twice.
Freud attempts to describe visible phenomena in an exacting way, but at the same time he limits his etching technique. He sets himself the challenge of reproducing complicated details using cross hatching and the juxtaposition of thick and thin and long and short lines. He does not utilize the aquatinting process. His refusal to deviate from actual visual phenomena, or to fudge it so to speak, ensures that his marks never become a form of short hand. Since lines do all the work in these etchings, they describe shapes and textures, tonal values, light sources and shadows, volume, and gravity’s and time’s impact on the flesh, the artist tends to etch a lot of them into the copper plate. Rather than feeling overwrought, these lines coalesce and dramatize the visual experience of looking long and hard at a living person. They make the interior lives of the artist and the sitter, both of whom vacillate between self awareness and awareness of the other during the making process, palpable to viewers.
Critics are usually ambivalent about Freud’s work. They are taken in by the realism, the accuracy or controlled expressiveness of his renderings. But they end up feigning either fright or revulsion. The writers who feel that there is a grotesque or unsympathetic component to his art are baffling because readers don’t know what they are comparing it to. Is it digitally altered images found in Web or print sources? Is it figural and portrait paintings they like better than his? Do they think the way they look at people is much more generous and hope filled? Freud thinks about and renders the world we live in everyday, not the re-presentation of it the media provides. This is not to say that his art works are more real than anything else you come across during waking hours. Freud is interested in the subtle movements of living bodies in real space because he knows the other is what gives life meaning and has the greatest impact on our lives. Desire does not always have a sexual component.
Freud’s art is hounded by the truism that no matter how disengaged our minds become or how indifferent we are to organic reality, including the natural world and the majority of the living on the earth, we can’t escape our complete dependence on other people. The cliché of the person eking out a meager existence alone on a desert island with only a pet rock for company, reflects reality truthfully only when that lone individual is portrayed as being in a perpetual state of longing. Whether a person is absent or present, if they are liked or disliked, or even if we have met or never met them in person, we need other people in our thoughts, because perceptions are always formed in and around the concept of the other. Freud makes art about live encounters with people, events that take place in real time. It is true that the viewer is left with the residuals of this process. We begrudge the artist and the model the connection they had, the conversations, the voyeuristic interaction, which included the naked repose of the model and the artist’s persistent mark making.
The manner in which Freud presents images of people makes one think he is a naturalist, an atheist who is awe-struck by the physical world he studies with such precision and overflowing love each day. The minutiae in his etchings, an overabundance of meticulously plotted lines whose intersections and transformations into illusions of three dimensional spaces and forms make us think about a person hovering over a surface deciding how best to describe the complicated feelings and sensations the other inspires, is complexly connected to our inherited needs and impulses and ways of communing with the world.
Writers have noted how Freud has lively chats with his subjects and is a good conversationalist. These types of observations are meant to counterbalance their comments about Freud’s ugly and dispassionate renderings of people. Who doesn’t have irregularities on their aging flesh? An argument could be made that his art does not ennoble the species in some obvious way, but it doesn’t hold up because it is in fact a celebration of the human race when an artist looks long and carefully at the other, spends so much time and energy trying to share with us their numerous observations, their yearnings for or empathy with him or her.
One could imagine Freud alone looking at his work, amused, dissatisfied with, or in general absorbed by the things he drew, etched, or painted that day, and fully aware that it is impossible for him to avoid returning to the creative process again, and perhaps more importantly, to the company of the model. Only someone who has spent a lot of time trying to make a good drawing of something they are observing can appreciate the ecstasy of looking that Freud must experience while rendering his models, or the people who mean a lot to him in a specific or more abstract way. Fortunately, our self love is so great that we are still drawn to Freud’s images of people, even if we find them repulsive, because of the enigmatic essence of human desire.
