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July 21, 2011
There is a strong empiricist current that runs through British art that goes back to John Locke. This current holds that western painting is the pursuit of reality – that in effect representational painting that tries to see things how they really are, even though what see is coloured by aesthetic convention.
Lucian Freud's paintings in showing us how he sees people and objects makes us aware of our own ways of looking:
Lucian Freud, Factory in North London, 1962, oil on canvas.
Portraits and nudes were his specialities, often observed in arresting close-up. The models are almost always friends or lovers, and he paints them with deliberate parsimony. The finished painting is an accumulation of richly worked layers of pigment, as well as months of intense observation.
Lucian Freud, portrait, Paddington, 1951, oil on canvas
This kind of representational work is akin to that done by large format photographers.
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