My Freudian phase

For the fourth image I was working on last week, I tried to incorporate Lucien Freud's style.  What I like about Freud's work is the utter humanity in it.  His paint surfaces are thick and groddy with lots of grey in them.  I never use grey.  I avoid grey!  Freud's studio is a horrible mess with rags and globbed paint and dirt all over the place.  I try to keep mine neat and clean and tidy so I can find everything, and I have to clearn up and organize before starting a new picture each time.  Freud's studio looks like he's never done that.  I feel sorry for his models who lie on piles of rags or a ragged bed or sofa.  I don't judge it so much as I'm aware I would be very uncomfortable being there!  But I LOVE his paintings.  There is a raw strength in them that comes from both the presence of the painted surface and from the presence of the models in his work.  He works from life and spends 100's of hours on each piece.  He models the surface almost like a sculptor with clay.

When I decided to study his work and to try to emulate aspects of his style, I realized several things - my paint had to be lots thicker; I had to use grey; I couldn't use many colors; I had to put on more layers than I'm used to, in much thicker paint.

I mixed up a pallette of colors and literally put dirt and chalk into them to thicken them and dry them out.  I also mixed up an achromatic grey using black and white.  I had never painted with black before.  I still didn't use it directly, but it certainly is in all the colors I used.  The first part I started to paint was the leg.  I had some lovely layers on it and was feeling good about it when Thomas came up, globbed on about an inch of paint on a flat brush and applied it crudely to the canvas - "No!  Now that's more like it!"  Ugh!  He ruined my pretty picture!  AND, admittedly, (pout), made my picture more powerful because I had to bring it all up to that level.  Now the leg looks like you see it on the right - it looks like I put clay on the canvas and made the darn thing 3-D.  I don't find it appealing and don't want to paint this way in general, but it's an outstanding exercise for learning what the possibilities are.  I would otherwise NEVER glob so much paint on!  Ugly!!

I finished the rest of the model's lower body similarly with lots of paint.  It felt freeing to glob the paint on and to let it be so ugly.  I didn't worry about messing up because I knew I could cover it in another layer with more paint.  That gave me a sweet freedom to experiment with colors and shading I might not have done otherwise.

That took me through the end of the morning.  In the afternoon, I began on her upper body.  Thomas wasn't around so much, so I drifted back somewhat to my more normal way of painting.  The paint is smoother, but I still worked with the colors more like I perceive him to.  I used grey and found that to be quite powerful.  I upped the amps on the colors to a certain extent the way Jenny Saville did, so sort of began to combine what I'd learned from both artists.

I think this upper part is more the way I'll try to paint in my next piece: considerably thicker paint, stronger color, bolder choices, more trust of the paint.  I'm realizing I have the skills now to render what I want to.  Now that I can do that, I can begin to experiment more and use my skills to explore other things.  The skills are there.  I can count on them and can begin to see just what it's possible to do with paint.

More from Thomas Bosket's workshop

Whenever I work with Thomas, I do brand new things which challenge and exite me.  I go to lands hitherto unknown to me.  I learn things I didn't know existed. 

There's the saying, "Reach for the stars and you may just reach the moon" - or something like that - the idea being that going way far out and reaching high at least gets you further than you'd be if you hadn't left your comfortable easy seat. 

It's like that for me with Thomas.  I am reaching for the stars.  Ultimately I end up at the moon after a long while of integrating what he's taught.

Here are the images I've been working on this week.  They're not nicely cropped because my canvas is too close to the wall to be able to get back far enough to take a good image, but it'll certainly give you an idea of what I'm working on.  They're quite different than my usual work!

This first picture will give you an indication of where the pieces all started.  They were in this shape at the beginning of the week, though the others had some indications of value on them as well (darker paint where the shadows are).

The second picture has two different images.  The one on the far left is the first one I did.  Thomas was showing me how some of the Masters painted.  They would put down a carefully gradiated layer of grey values and from there they would work darker with transparent paints and lighter with opaque ones.  Obviously I haven't gotten to the second stage of that one yet.

This is Thomas's first layer of a painting by Rembrandt to show me how to do the layers juicier and looser.  I used that technique - believe it or not - in the second one before putting on all the crazy layers.

The second picture in this image is what I spent most of yesterday on.  Thomas gave a demo on mark making in the morning then I decided to try to incorporate all those types of marks - and more - into my painting.  I went into the basement and found a bunch of crazy tools to use - bad house paintbrushes, twine, scrapers, plastic pieces, etc., -  then looked outside for more - leaves, sticks, twigs.  I think I used them all.  It was very freeing to try to think of ways to use each one.  It gave the picture a lot of diversity of marks and many interesting passges throughout.

Chris looked at it in the evening and wanted to know how people feel looking at it who already like my work the way it is.  I told him that isn't the point.  I have to keep developing as an artist - it's the only way to be an artist - to keep exploring and learning new things.  I doubt my work will continue to look like this, but for right now, it does - and it might.  And if that's the case, then people will either like it, or they won't, but I'm not creating for other people - I'm creating because I have to.  I think artists die inside if they get trapped into making art that always looks the same.  It's a horrible fate, and I refuse to consign myself to it.  Period.

So the second image has lots of explorations in it.  Lots of different types of marks.  Lots of intense color.  Chris commented that it has lots of emotion in it - I can certainly see how it gives that impression - but I wasn't angry or anything like that.  Instead I was curious.  I was playing.  I was intensely interested in what I was doing.  I listened to music for part of it, but that was actually too much - it got in the way of the rest of my mind. 

This last image was a real gift from Thomas.  He came out to the studio with me after the other students had leaft, after dinner.  We looked at a book of Jenny Saville's images.  She's amazing the way she paints.  The image here is the one we were looking at when we did the above image.  It hasn't gotten to the finished stage Jenny Saville's piece is at yet, but we're heading there.  Saville puts all those colors underneath - those gashes of paint, the drips and runs and stains and deep darks and shocking lights.  Then turns out with something so exquisite and real looking, it makes me want to weep with recognition of the pure humanity of it.  Her work is also 10' tall or bigger usually.  I wish I had such a large canvas prepared so I could practice on it, but this smaller one will have to do for now.

Thomas sat behind me and told me the strokes to put on and how.  It's so completely foreign to me to figure out how to do those strokes - I mean, compare that image to the first, grey, subtle one!  This later one is NOT my normal predilection!  But I'm loving learning how to do it.  I am looking forward to figuring out the next layer today.  I feel trepidation about being able to figure it out myself, but that's the task I'm setting for myself.

So now the canvas looks crazy with the three different styles of pictures on it, but I'm seeing it as an incredible opportunity to learn so much in one week.  Amazing!

Off to the races!  Who knows what'll be up here tomorrow????!!