Lucian Freud Oil Painting Brushstroke Style Analysis

Oil painting brushstroke is an important painting language, and excellent painters always present different style characteristics from others when they use brushstroke. Lucian Freud Lucian Freud (born in 1929) is one of the most representative painters of realistic painting in today's world. When we examine Freud's works in various periods, we will find that no matter in his personal style tends to mature works, or early portrait works with a sense of flatness and decorative meanings, his oil paintings brushstrokes always maintain a strong and unique style, especially in a large number of his sketches. Especially in his numerous life drawing works of the human body, the brushstrokes are unified with space, volume, structure, light and shadow, color and other painting factors, forming a unique painting language with great aesthetic value. In the following, the author analyzes Lucian Freud's brushstrokes. Freud's brushstroke style is analyzed.

Early on, Swiss aesthetician Heinrich Wolfring wrote in his book Artistic Style. Wolfflin summarized five pairs of basic concepts containing dialectical relationship in "Artistic Styles", one of which is "line drawing and painting". He pointed out that "the line-drawing style is viewed in terms of lines, while the painting style is viewed in terms of blocks" and that "these two styles are two views of the world, which are different in their aesthetic interest and their interest in the world, and yet each is capable of producing a perfect picture of the visible things. ". ① Line drawing style is characterized by line-based modeling, with attention focused on the edge line (contour line) of the object. The artistic image of the line drawing style is flat, with no strong sense of three-dimensionality, space, and light and shadow effects. Painting style is characterized by observing things with the concepts of decency, light and shadow, and space, and modeling with light and dark color blocks, focusing on the sense of volume of the object. He not only summarized the two basic forms of painting, but also implied a general generalization of brushstrokes. Different ways of seeing produce different patterns, and inevitably different strokes are used to create them.

Freud, inspired by his ideas, changed his style of painting throughout his subsequent career, and the general evolution can be divided into three phases: the 1940s as the early period; the 1950s as the middle period; and the 1960s onwards as the mature period. Each period presents a different style of brushwork.

1. Early smooth and delicate, line-drawing oil painting brushstroke style

Freud's early paintings, on the whole, are rational, refined, pretentious and tense, indicating that he and the Nordic painters such as Dürer, Holbein and other temperament of the same lineage, but at the same time it is also clear that the influence of Engel on him, and these three painters are the representative of the line-drawing style of painting painters. Freud's oil paintings at this stage have smooth and delicate strokes, soft haloing and almost flat painting, a calm depiction, clear and definite outlines of the forms, extreme rigor in the fine details, and meticulous outlining. During this period he painted a series of portraits of his first wife, Kitty Garman, as a model. The portraits he painted during this period, using his first wife, Kitty Garman, as his model, are the most typical, such as the oil paintings Girl and Cat (1947) and Girl with a Rose (1947-1948), which reveal a certain personal style: the figures in the paintings are tense and melancholic and full of skeptical and fearful expressions. He painstakingly paints the hair and eyelashes with rational lines, applies thin colors, and creates porcelain skin with no visible brushstrokes, as well as clothing and backgrounds.

2. Mid-period of linear, short and subtle oil painting brushstrokes

Freud's mid-period painting style has shifted from artifice to elegance, and from nervousness to calmness, but it is still rational and refined. This period was an exploratory stage before the maturity of his painting style, which was reflected in the careful use of brushstrokes. 1950 onwards, Freud began to pay attention to the sense of volume and the contrast between light and dark, and retained the clearer contour lines of the past. The colors are richer, the brushstrokes are much more pronounced than in the early period, and the transition between brushstrokes is natural and subtle. Because the colors were still thin and not repeatedly modified, the brush marks were clearly visible, leaving short brushstrokes in the form of rows of lines on the screen, reflecting the more natural state of existence of the characters. His major works of this period include Girl with White Dog (1951-1952), Room Prisoner, at Paddington (1952), Francis Bacon (1952), and The Rise and Fall of the Rising Sun (1952). Bacon Portrait (1952) and others, as is evident from Head of a Boy (1954).

While Freud's works of this period have not been able to completely escape the influence of his earlier style, the more natural and in-depth approach to representation has heralded the beginning of his maturity, especially between 1958 and 1959, which can be called an important milestone in his painting career. As Robert Hughes puts it, "When the time came for the artist to make his mark on the world, it was a time of great change. Hughes said, "When he decisively left the Angellian flatness and contour lines, the work Smiling Woman (1958-1959) marked a turning point in his figure painting." (2) In this painting, the brushstrokes no longer resemble the early flatness or the subtle articulation of mid-career brushstrokes, but become more layered and expressive, and henceforth the Angellian line is a thing of the past in Lucien's paintings. With the conversion of brushstrokes, the use of colors becoming thicker and thicker, and the brushstrokes and texture becoming more and more varied, Freud finally presented everyone with a unique style of brushstrokes.

3. Mature rich and varied, painted oil painting brush style

In 1954, Freud found that his sketches led to too many lines in his oil paintings, and since the end of 1959, his sketches as an independent artistic activity came to a standstill, and a suspension of seven years, which also shows that the painter began to explore the change of painting style. 60s later, Freud made it clear that he had replaced the soft brush strokes with the thick and hard pig bristle brush strokes. After the 60's, Freud made it clear that he replaced the soft sable brush with the thick and hard pig bristle brush so that he could apply thick paint. As the thick and hard pig bristle brush was more elastic and strong, the brush marks were clearly visible after the operation of the brush, which was more expressive, and from then on the artist began to use strong and powerful brush strokes to shape the characters, which left long traces along with the structure of the painting, and always followed the direction of the twists and turns in the structure of the form and the interspersed combinations. Freud's creations, this significant change according to the continuous maturation of the practice of artistic creation and the requirements of the subjective will and constantly strengthened, clean and sharp strokes, strokes from thin to thick, the painter's brushstrokes are rich and diverse: wedge-type, ring, "work" type, "zig-zag" type, etc., the painter's brushstrokes are very diverse, and the artist's brushstrokes are very strong and powerful. The artist's brushstrokes are of various types: wedge-shaped, ring-shaped, "work", "zigzag", and so on, and various kinds of long and short brushstrokes freely toss, twist, pile up, and overlap on the canvas, and between the horizontal and vertical smears, they shape a strong and powerful form and form a thick texture effect, which is extremely strong in pictorial expressive power. "By the eighties and nineties, his brushwork had reached the realm of perfection, with strength in simplicity, vivid and full of vitality." (3) Such as the works "The Painter and the Model" and "Self-Portrait with a Drawing Board", etc., the display of these strong strokes during the mature period of art, as well as the unique description of life and psychology, and the innovative pursuit of extreme visual impact, ****the same constitutes the distinctive features of the works in the mature stage of Freud's art, and ultimately creates the uniquely charming individual style of Freud's art.

Freud developed the application of the language of brushstroke in the field of figurative painting to an irrefutable realm, "while expressing the strong form of the sense of human existence and the sense of three-dimensional space, it also shows the possibility of this ontological language of art to indicate the inner life of the objective entity, and expands the application of the language of abstraction in the field of figurative painting to a wider dimension, and at the same time, the language itself is also the most powerful. At the same time, the language itself gains a strong vitality". Freud used the most straightforward method to show the real and believable side of the object, without any sense of artifice and craftsmanship, and at the same time, the brushstrokes were perfectly combined with the connotation of the theme that Freud wanted to express, and became an indispensable part of Freud's style of painting.

Notes:

1) Heinrich? Wolfring. Artistic Stylistics [M]. Pan Yaochang, Translation. Beijing: Renmin University of China Press, 2004.

②Fu Lili, Lucian? Freud's Theory of Traits in Painting [J]. Journal of Nanjing Art Institute (Art and Design Edition), 2000.(2).

③Qi Junsheng. On Lucian Freud's Painting Art [J]. Freud's Painting Art[J]. Art Observation, 2006(2):84.

④ Weng Tianxian. Touching Lucian Freud[J]. Freud[J]. New Art, 2001.(2).

Author: Academy of Fine Arts, Jiamusi University

(Responsibility Editor: He Xiumei)