Despite his size, Leigh Bowery was delicate and supple. Freud had always shunned working with professional models, but as a performer, Bowery was able to invent and sustain demanding poses. The two men developed a close relationship and for four years Bowery was his most consistent model. He said that sitting for Freud was like having a university education. Unknown to the artist, Bowery was gravely ill with AIDS.
[It’s via Bowery that Freud found his way to Big Sue]
To clarify: David (Dawson) was Lucian (Freud)’s assistant of 20 years, Eli (of “Eli and David” and of “Portrait of the Hound”) is David’s whippet, and Pluto (of “Sunny Morning — Eight Legs”) was Lucian’s… “Portrait of the Hound” was Freud’s last and unfinished portrait.
Leigh Bowery introduced Freud to friends he thought might interest him of whom his clubbing friend, Sue Tilley, was one. For Freud, painting Tilley, known as “Big Sue”, was a continuation of his fascination with flesh, although he talked about not wanting to over indulge his ‘predilection towards people of unusual or strange proportions’.
Sue Tilley (or Big Sue, as she came to be known) lies languidly on the sofa in a bohemian artist’s studio, far removed from her day job as a civil servant working for the Department of Social Security. Freud was initially fascinated by her size, however as time passed her proportions became more ordinary to him. Freud’s portraits of Tilley are a celebration of flesh and as a feminine as Manet’s “Olympia” or “Rokeby Venus” by Velasquez, although far less idealised
The National Portrait Gallery is running an exhibition on Lucian Freud. Ten rooms filled with stunning portraits. Big Sue is plashed over all four walls of room VIII.
Petros Vrellis used openFrameworks to make Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” come to life by enabling the user to visualize the flow of the painting and interact with it by touch. The sound responds to the flow too.
“Flight into Italy - Swiss Landscape”, David Hockney, 1962
One of the very few early landscape works that are included in the current Hockney exhibition at the RA. I love this painting for its humour. Funny story is that Hockney did go on a road trip through Switzerland in the hope of getting his landscaping juices flowing, but as it turned out, he spent the entire trip sitting in the back of a mini-van with no windows. “That’s Switzerland, that was”.
I remember there was this really cool BBC One’s Imagine doc following Hockney on a painting journey in his native Yorkshire back in 2009. The RA special exhibition is the direct result of that project of his. The exhibition struck me as a bit gimmicky; it’s clear that Hockney needs to reinvent himself every now and again to keep his art relevant… He’s keen to embrace new technology and new platforms (his multitude of ipad artworks blown up to large scale canvases and displayed on the RA’s walls are impressive, as are his large multi-camera/multi-screen videos), he also likes a good challenge: filling up those gigantic RA’s galleries with fresh new work seemed irresistible to him (he went for quantity and scale). Planting himself in front of trees in Yorkshire and painting the same spot as fast as possible and as many times as possible in order to capture the subtle changes in light and seasons may not be groundbreaking but it’s a sure way to fill up a gallery, and, surprisingly enough, the overall density of the work is rather pretty to look at. Also, large scale (very large, in this case) is a trick that never fails to wow me.
The notoriously secretive creative process of reclusive German artist Gerhard Richter is exposed in filmmaker Corinna Belz’s new fly-on-the-wall documentary, Gerhard Richter Painting. Belz spent three years as an observer in Richter’s Cologne studio capturing mesmerizing footage of the artist producing his radical abstract works. As we witness him mixing layer upon layer of bold primary colors, smearing the wet paint with a giant squeegee and scraping at the surfaces of the canvases, Richter’s masterpieces appear before our eyes. “You get the feeling the paintings are staring at you,” says Belz, who met the painter while filming his vibrant pixelated stained glass window for the Cologne Cathedral. “There’s a physicality to Richter’s paintings. I wanted the viewer to become immersed in the subtly suspenseful cycle of the process.” Belz’s poetic film coincides with Richter’s 80th birthday and a major retrospective at London’s Tate Modern spanning five decades of his varied work.
Awesome. I love the sound the squeegee makes across the canvas. btw, the Richter exhibit @ The Tate Modern is phenomenal and it ends this Sunday. Go.
The boy sits beside the Seine on a sunny afternoon, staring blankly at the water, his legs dangling over the bank. The central figure in Georges Seurat’s 1884 Bathers at Asnières, he has been repainted by the Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal. In Sasnal’s version, the boy is alone, sitting in a kind of visual silence, all detail drained to a minimum. Everyone else has gone; the factories on the horizon are reduced to an aching, peach-coloured line cutting through the flat blue of river and sky.
Seurat’s painting reminded Sasnal of a story his grandmother told, about the hot summer of 1939, weeks before the German invasion of Poland, when people bathed in the river near his birthplace. That summer was a preamble to years of misery, and Sasnal records it as a kind of perpetual waiting. The late sculptor Juan Muñoz once wrote that looking at Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières was like looking at the desert, and I, too, have always felt that there was an awful emptiness at its heart. It is a kind of emptiness that Sasnal amplifies, again and again.
I grew up in Asnieres. I never bathed in the Seine though. Ah, all the things I’ve missed.
I caught the last day of the Wilhem Sasnal exhibition @ the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Very moody and melancholic stuff. I was blown away by the versatility of his style and the complexity of details he can evoke with just a few rough brushstrokes.
Here are a few portraits using interesting angles.
Wilhelm Sasnal makes paintings in response to the abundance of imagery that emerged in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. No two Sasnal paintings ever look alike: he makes pop paintings, naturalistic paintings and abstracts. Some of his works look like still lifes, others like street scenes or record labels. Sasnal has even been known to make paintings about nothing at all: a roll of tape, a computer disk or a plant.Wilhelm Sasnal is one of the most celebrated artists to emerge from Eastern Europe in recent years. Working from his home country Poland, he uses painting as a means to intimately negotiate his position within (new) capitalist culture. Sasnal’s work is prolific, varied and deliberately unclassifiable as a strategy: digesting his practice is akin to swallowing mass media whole.
This landmark exhibition focuses on Edgar Degas’s preoccupation with movement as an artist of the dance. Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement traces the development of the artist’s ballet imagery throughout his career, from the documentary mode of the early 1870s to the sensuous expressiveness of his final years.The exhibition is the first to present Degas’s progressive engagement with the figure in movement in the context of parallel advances in photography and early film; indeed, the artist was keenly aware of these technological developments and often directly involved with them.
I wasn’t particularly thrilled by the idea of spending a Friday evening staring at Degas’s ballerinas, but I’m glad I was dragged to this exhibit; it’s really well put together and it was fascinating to follow Degas’ obsession with capturing movement in painting, especially in the context photography and film.
