Anatomy of a Portrait (Lucian Freud)

Dimensions95 cm x 95 cm x 20 cm
Materials Carved glass, cast aluminum, cast bronze, steel

This is a sculpture about portrait painting and portraits in general. Portraits are an artist’s interpretation of the subject they are depicting. In the case of this sculpture I have focused on Lucian Freud, one of the most revered portrait painters of the 20th and early 21st century and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. In the past when creating a sculpture, I used photographs to realize the likeness of my subject. In this case I relied solely on paintings thus the images of Freud were as he saw himself and a bit how two of his friends saw him. The image of the large glass head is taken from “Reflection”, a self-portrait done in 1985 and the three cast metal heads which resemble Venetian carnival masks left to right from unfinished self-portraits (1956, 2004,1980’s). Artist R.B. Kitage formed a group of ten figurative painters including Freud into what is now commonly known as the School of London. Two members of that group painted portraits of Lucian Freud from which I extrapolated line drawings to create the steel painted cutouts: eye and ear by Frank Auerbach and mouth and chin by Francis Bacon. An intensely private person he painted within his own small world of friends and family and his objective was to move the senses by giving an intensification of reality.