I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art.
— Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud paints the person as animal—hence his fondness for painting nudes. The above quote points to this motivation. His art is that of the flesh, the quality of the flesh.
Reinforcing the idea of Freud painting flesh, he’s quoted as saying the following about the above painting (Benefits Supervisor Sleeping):
It's flesh without muscle and it has developed a different kind of texture through bearing such a weight-bearing thing
The Royal Academy gives a description of Lucian Freud’s work:
Lucian Freud (1922–2011) changed how we look at people. He filled his canvases with bodies rarely given space elsewhere: fat bodies, ageing bodies, queer bodies, exhausted bodies. Some have described his portraits as ruthless, pitiless, clinical and cruel; others see them as intimate and honest records of humanity. He once described himself as “a sort of biologist”, interested in “the insides and undersides of things”.
He decided that “I want the paint to feel like flesh”, and the more painting he did, the more flesh there was. As he came to realise: “I am really interested in people as animals. Part of my liking to work from them naked is for that reason. Because I can see more.”
Flesh is flesh—except Freud’s art can be conceived as a form of knowledge creation. Realism as a method of understanding something about the world. Something about the human animal.
While Freud is best known for his portraiture—especially his nudes—he was also accomplished at painting and drawing plants. About one-fifth of his work depicted plants. He mentioned having tremendous trouble when painting Two Plants (below), which, despite the struggle, demonstrates his skill in rendering the subject matter.
Biographical note 1: Lucian Freud was the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Lucian told his daughter, Bella, that Sigmund was very funny.
Biographical note 2: Lucian Freud had an unconventional private life. He had many children and many lovers. He had 14 acknowledged children and perhaps more than double that in total. What may seem controversial by today’s standards is that he painted some of his daughters naked. An example is a 21-year-old Bella Freud:
Biographical note 3: As a mid-century artist, he was friends with other accomplished London artists, including Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach. They were a loose group known as the ‘School of London’. What bound them together formally was figurative painting. Lucian can be seen talking to Francis Bacon in the photo below:
The School of London further explained by the Tate:
In 1976, at the height of minimal art and conceptual art, the American painter R.B. Kitaj, then based in Britain, organised an exhibition titled The Human Clay at the Hayward Gallery in London. It exclusively consisted of figurative drawing and painting, which proved to be highly controversial to an art world which was dominated by abstraction. In his catalogue text, Kitaj used the term School of London loosely to describe the artists he had brought together. The name has stuck to refer to painters at that time who were doggedly pursuing forms of figurative painting.
Biographical note 4: Lucian Freud was known to have childlike handwriting. This same handwriting was used to make a brand logo for his daughter’s eponymously named fashion business Bella Freud.
Some of Freud’s earliest worked tended toward surrealism:
Freud’s early post-WW2 portraiture had a different quality to the mature part of his oeuvre. It was graphic and linear. That’s to say, his early portraits had the quality of drawings. His subjects were also not nude, and his early paintings were smaller than his later paintings.
Regarding Freud’s mature style, Wikipedia has some interesting passages:
From the 1950s, he began to focus on portraiture, often nudes […] to the almost complete exclusion of everything else, and by the middle of the decade developed a much more free style using large hog's-hair brushes, concentrating on the texture and colour of flesh, and much thicker paint, including impasto. Girl with a White Dog, 1951–1952, (Tate) is an example of a transitional work in this process, sharing many characteristics with paintings before and after it, with relatively tight brushwork and a middling size and viewpoint.
[…]
By about 1960, Freud had established the style that he would use, with some changes, for the rest of his career.
The transitional painting from the Wikipedia quote:
An example of his mature work is below. Formal notes: impasto (thick paint), sculptural—dimensionality, materiality, occupying space.
Freud had an unusual way of approaching the painting of a portrait. He would start in the middle of the face and work outward. The method most commonly taught is to work from large to small and the abstract to the particulars. For example, traditionally, if you were going to draw a head, you would lay-in the outside of the head before working on the features. The process of an artist—and Freud’s process—can be seen from unfinished work:
Another thing to note about Freud’s artworks are the untraditional angles he sometimes used:
Self-portraits are a recurring motif. Similarly to Rembrandt, Freud has painted the passing of time and the toll of time on the human body. Lucian avoided expressions to ensure he didn’t paint himself in a pleasant, or mean, or dramatising way. Freud felt that too often painters would paint themselves in a grandiose way whilst not doing the same for other sitters.
The models that Lucian used tended to be friends and family. Friends included well-known artists such as Francis Bacon, David Hockney, and Frank Auerbach.
Freud also painted the famous. Examples include Queen Elizabeth II of England and the model Kate Moss (nude in Kate Moss’s case).
Lucien Freud took a notoriously long time to paint a portrait. The David Hockney portrait took 4 months with daily sittings. Another example is Ria, Naked Portrait from 2006–2007 which took 16 months for 5 hours each evening (excluding 4 evenings in the 16 months).
As previously mentioned, Freud is most known for his nudes:
Freud painted for much of his life and only lay down his brushes two weeks before he passed away.
Unrealistic as it sounds, I want each picture I’m working on to be the only picture that I’m working on, to go a bit further, the only picture that I’ve ever worked on, and to go even a bit further, the only picture that anyone has ever done.
— Lucian Freud