EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

“.....And that impact is him.”

A user kindly sent me a link to William Feaver's appreciation of his long friendship with Lucian Freud which appeared in a UK newspaper yesterday. You can read the full article at The Guardian but here are a couple of excerpts:

"There was nothing monstrous lurking in his [Freud's] private life, although he might well have behaved badly. He was fond of his children, but even they had to accept that the painting always came first. He used to say: "I am completely selfish and I only do what I want to do." In my view, though, many of the great painters are fundamentally selfish, but they go on to give so much to us in their art."

He concluded: "Lucian believed all his paintings were a kind of self-portrait. "They are all autobiography," he would say. When I look at his work, however, I see his strange way of approaching things: slightly from the side, slightly awkwardly, but deliberately so, not cack-handedly so. When he was painting, at the point where you or I would probably say to ourselves: "OK. Stop. Leave it now," Lucian would press on. Sometimes he did this to disastrous effect, but often not. His work, I would say, does not reproduce very well and that is often true of the work of a really great artist. However, when you actually see one of his paintings in front of you the impact is extraordinary. And that impact is him."