Help from Kokoshka and Freud

In continuing my battle with the artist statement, I decided to grab one of my books and see how some other artists have written about portraiture. In The Grove Book of Art Writing’s section called “ The Human Clay: Humanity in Art”, there is a text written by Oskar Kokoshka- an artist whose name I recognize but I haven't really studied at all. Here are a few of his thoughts:



“What used to shock people in my portraits was that I tried to intuit from the face, from its play of expressions, and from gestures, the truth about a particular person, and to recreate in my own pictorial language the distillation of a living being that would survive in memory….In a face I look for the flash of the eye, the tiny shift of expression which betrays an inner movement...

I see creative art as a source, a spring, like Nature itself. I defend it as the constantly active, living material of thought.”






And from one of my favorite painters, Lucien Freud:

“A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure…the aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh. The effect that they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their color or smell. The effect in space of two different individuals can be as different as the effect of a candle and an electric lightbulb…


A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then that the painter realizes that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope that the picture might spring to life. Were it not for this, the perfect painting might be painted, on the completion of which the painter could retire. It is this great insufficiency that drives him on. Thus the process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than is the picture."