Lucian Freud and NPG Visit

Freud's portraits have always had some kind of uneasy reverence, but they are beautiful all the same. From his early work (that are most interesting and informative to my work this year) to his later, emotive, strange portraits. Adrian Seale of the Guardian commented on his 2012 show at the National Portrait Gallery, London, "Neither a realist nor an expressionist – though there is as much reality as there is expression in his art – Freud depicted the psychological tensions between himself and his subjects. " The tension in the stares of Freud's subjects interact with the viewer, almost everything he painted was a portrait of a situation, confrontation, whether it was his daughter, lover or a stranger.

For example, Girl with Cat asks so many questions to the viewer. The blank stare of the girl and the way she's holding the cat, somewhat suffocating the poor thing and the cat itself staring blankly into the viewer's eyes as if to ask for help. This uncomfortable notion that Freud so effortlessly creates within his early paintings and drawings in his sketchbooks is what I want to take from his work and to try and recreate it in some way.

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When I visited the National Portrait Gallery in London during the summer I visited Freud's section of the gallery. This part of the gallery was showing Freud's early sketchbooks which inspired me to change my hyper realism and delve into the somewhat unknown with manipulating features and with this making the viewer question their own reality.