Sitting for Lucian Freud

The Freud method is to leave areas of untouched surface visible until very late on. This is, as he characteristically put it, "because it makes it more difficult, which helps me". "Many painters," he explained further, "may like to feel that they are working on a picture that is already there. But I like to feel that every aspect of it is provisional, changeable, removable." Consequently, my portrait grew outwards from a single point - "organically" as Freud puts it.
First he does a charcoal drawing, but does not necessarily "go by" it. By Christmas, two eyes could be seen, surrounded by a patch of paint mainly representing my forehead. At Easter, the face stretched down to my chin. When the sun of early June arrived, there was just a quartet of white patches in the corners of the rectangle. But that proved deceptive. The jacket, for example, I thought would be an easy bit - after all, it just consists of plain blue cloth.
It did not prove so at all. He painted it one way; he painted it another. He changed the angle and contour of my shoulders, then altered them again, and again. The lapels were put in, taken out, put in once more. "The more paint goes on the jacket," he said thoughtfully after this had gone on for three or four sittings, "the better - to show it's different from the rest of the picture." "Sometimes," he added contentedly, "I spend weeks just painting and repainting the corner of a room."
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Irish Art