As you’ll see from my website, portraits are not something I often have a stab at. I admire them but struggle to get the same freedom and creativity that you can from a landscape.
So to learn more about portraits I went along to two major exhibitions; Lucian Freud The Self Portraits at the Royal Academy, and Gauguin Portraits at the National Gallery.
Here’s what I thought:
Freud’s self portraits
Freud is a bit like the ‘Where’s Wally’ of portraiture. If he’s not the subject of the painting, then he still likes to make sure he kind of is. Whether it’s a shadow of his head on a bed, or looking back through the window behind the sitter, you can pretty much always see Freud somewhere on the canvas, it becomes a bit of a game to spot him, so your attention is always diverted from the main subject.
There’s no doubt he probably had a bit of an advantage in the art word, after all he comes from a pretty recognisable lineage. Freud’s mum helped him to get one of his paintings in the London Guggenheim Jeune Gallery when he was a kid. Not a bad start really.
I found I quite enjoyed learning about Freud’s style, which has definitely changed a lot since he was a teenager, from the sharp jawline and wide-eyed sketches, to pallets of flesh tones and a thick application of paint - definitely more my style. Its worth a trip to the exhibition if you can get there before it closes in January.
Gauguin’s Portraits
I know you don’t have to like an artist to really love their work, but Gauguin kind of annoys me, really annoys me actually. He’s like that friend that never stops banging on about his gap year and boring everyone with details of how fascinating it was.
To me, Gauguin always seemed to be in search of an authentic and untouched part of the world (but only the places in which everyone could conveniently speak French).
He loved Tahiti and painted some of his most recognisable works there, going back several times later on in life. Aside from some the dodgy stuff he got up to when he was out there, I think the thing that frustrates me is that for someone in constant search of authenticity, he was always trying to recreate what he wanted to see, not what was actually happening. Gauguin frequently asked people to dress in traditional robes (or none at all), rather than in their everyday clothes, and he painted rituals he’d made up when he thought the ones he saw were a bit boring.
So two very different exhibitions, two very different styles. Both are on until 26 January and you can easily visit them in the same evening.
