It's telling a story beyond the bodies and how they're positioned.
There's a rhythm to the painting.
I think there's a lot of playfulness in this painting as well.
There's a lot of, like, vulnerability and empathy to it.
Hello, my name is Hannah Uzor.
I'm a student on the MA at the Slade.
I'm Mark Lee.
I'm in the second year MFA Fine Art.
My name is Netanya Schwab-Matalon.
I'm currently here studying in London from California.
I am in the Bachelors of Fine Art programme.
I think my style is varied, to be honest, and it's driven by my subject matter.
My memories have really informed how I paint.
I'm really interested in figures and how
they are reflected in landscape or in a setting.
And I remember, as a child, going on a road trip and my dad had noticed that when I
came back home, I'd painted the entire scene.
And I think a lot of my work has to do with the evoking of that memory,
the spectator looking in at a moment in time.
The painting is actually a painting of my son when we went on holiday.
The memory is definitely my son,
but the landscape in which he's set is an imagined space.
Featuring my children in my work is
a really sensitive, obviously, subject matter.
How much you reveal and how much you conceal is really important.
The interesting thing about Freud,
he does create this sort of tension, your desire to see.
At the same time, you're internalising this
sort of intense moment of him as an artist, looking at the person that he's
depicting and wondering about the dynamics of that intense moment of gaze.
It's capturing that emotion, I think, that Freud has that I try to do in my work.
I made my entire portfolio for the Slade in the span of two months.
So I was basically staying up for, like,
20 hours a day, making painting after painting after painting.
The only subject I had on hand was myself.
So I would just do obsessive self-portraiture in front of the mirror.
And when I first came here I was interested [in] the flesh, femininity,
etc and what that looked like representatively.
But now I'm more sort of interested in relationships between figures.
I'm really interested in the idea of
a piece people can feel both embraced and repelled by, I guess.
I think I was always doodling
and then I was just looking at lots of graffiti
as I grew up.
I was always drawing or
painting figurative images.
I was looking at a lot of manga
or looking at a lot of films.
I think I just bring all these different kind of inspirations and just put it
onto painting and try to understand what they are.
It's between real life and my imagination.
I'm into this feeling of absurdity but
I think I'm trying to portray that idea in a lighter way.
My first experience of seeing Lucian Freud was this exhibition that my friend
recommended me to go there since I was mainly focused on figurative painting.
Throughout his kind of painting journey, I like the way he was always exploring
figure, like what I'm trying to do at the moment.
I think he kept trying to understand what painting is.
My name is Daniel Herrmann.
I'm the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Projects, here at the National Gallery.
We are now right here in The Credit Suisse
Exhibition: Lucian Freud: New Perspectives.
And we have our Slade students with us
and want to hear how they think about these works by Lucian Freud.
So what we're looking at right now is 'Bella and Esther' from around 1987.
And what we see is a portrait that's actually a double portrait.
It's a very difficult genre to paint
because you try to elicit relationships between two sitters
on the canvas and convey that to the viewer.
Immediately I'm drawn to the composition and the awkwardness of how they're sitting
and at the same time they look very relaxed.
The faces look very, you know,
of an intimate relationship.
It's telling a story beyond the bodies and how they're positioned.
There's a rhythm to the painting.
And there's a certain...
there's almost a certain stage set, isn't there?
That something has been prepared for this moment of creating that intimacy as well.
Certainly, you can see how the legs sort
of intertwine and move together.
There's that contact point there that just really
brings that intimacy, that relationship that they have together.
And it's a very natural sort of
position of the leg in terms of how it was touching the other leg.
And I think sometimes when you look at the painting you'd have to probably
take a second glance to see if that hand is actually the hand of the sister
at the back or actually if it's the hand of the girl in the foreground.
That does say this is people that do know
each other and that are relaxed in each other's proximity.
So what we are looking at right now is one
of the very first paintings that Freud ever exhibited.
It's a self-portrait
painted in 1940.
What I think is interesting about it is
that we're witnessing how an artist is trying to make choices and how he's
working out and working through how to paint and which ways to paint.
I think when I came into this room and then saw this painting,
it's something that I wouldn't expect from, kind of, his paintings.
I think the figure doesn't really, kind of, make sense in a way.
It has a very kind of small nose and really, kind of, flat face
and it doesn't really have that
kind of depth into this figure's face like his other works.
When you look at the painting
like this and you think about your own practice, where do you see parallels?
Where do you see differences?
I think I'm at the moment where
I'm just trying to figure out
how this kind of oil paint works onto the painting.
And I think maybe we're in the kind of like same stage in a way.
Trying things out and figuring out how the material itself works.
Yes.
I think there's a lot of playfulness into this painting as well.
That's where I'm kind of relating my works.
What we're looking at here right now is a drawing.
It's 'The Painter's Mother, Dead', 1989.
And what happened is that Lucian Freud's
mother had been growing weaker and weaker as age went on.
And in 1989, she passed away, and Freud actually sat at her deathbed drawing.
And for me, as an art historian, it's really interesting looking at this
with a view of how other people have portrayed dead people.
But of course, in the end,
it's also a portrayal of a body in a very different way.
It's maybe much more tender.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of
vulnerability and empathy to it, is immediately what I get.
Because when you're making a painting, especially when you're doing it standing
up with this, like, thick, impasto paint, it's all in the gesture of the elbow
and the wrist, whereas this, this is all in the movement of the fingers.
Also, in a way, I think Freud used the process
of painting, of drawing to create time between him and the sitters.
And in a way, he created relationships through art.
Of course, here the relationship is
literally past and he's just left with his pencil.
Because in the paintings, it's more of this illusion
of a moment in time that he's capturing.
So it looks like one narrative, cohesive picture when
in reality, it's an amalgamation of hours, upon hours, of work.
So that, I think, is really interesting
in that this is like, I guess, the true moment.
Looking at Freud in the way that you have done right now,
what is your impression?
What are your thoughts?
I think it was really interesting to see his journey as a painter.
The physicality of the paint, in terms of how
these figures are so, like, over-fleshed out, perhaps even like
over-painted or over-saturated on the canvas cloth, in terms of just
getting this sense of weight and like, tenseness and sort of fragility.
I think, for me, Freud is somebody who spent a lot of time
looking, you know, looking at his subject matter, and it's intense looking that's
reflected back in how he then paints the work.
So, I think, for me, it's an intensity of a moment that's captured in his work.