Gloop and glory

Portrait of Julia

Jason Farago in the NY Times:

...Frank Auerbach, the British artist of oily, encrusted paintings that teeter between durability and disintegration. Auerbach, who turns 90 in April, is the last surviving member of a pathfinding generation of postwar British figurative painters, and 25 of his industrious paintings and drawings, made across four decades, each the hard-won product of months or even years of labor, are on view at the Manhattan gallery Luhring Augustine....

...these paintings are definitely not the sort you love at first sight — but they are so rewarding to fathom in person....

It might have a particular value for young artists who are living through a revival in the fortunes of portrait painting, though of a safer kind that translates seamlessly from canvas to Instagram. In Auerbach’s dense, congealed surfaces, they may discover how even the most compelling of portraits has to come up to the edge of failure....

....It hardly looks like a portrait at all. Julia[his wife, above] appears to be just a dense knot of thick golden strokes. The impasto is both a veil and a mirror, and much of the pleasure and challenge of these paintings comes from the tension between the careful observation in the dusty studio and the thick, fossilized surfaces of the finished paintings. 

You looked at someone for a whole year and saw....this? (The Gloopy Glory of Frank Auerbach’s Portraits)

Rob's comment:

That's a question Julia may have asked after sitting in his studio for a year. Or maybe she was diplomatic and said, "Yes, that's me! I don't know how you do it, darling!" One wonders about their relationship.

But "young artists" can take heart from Auerbach's example. If you can't draw or paint---some house painting in the past might help---and want to be an artist, you can still make that dream come true!

See also Art criticism in the Chronicle.