Boy's Head 1952

Lucian Freud’s painted this boy's head with oil paint and a whole lot of looking. There's something so alive about how Freud worked. It’s in the little touches – the way he builds up the skin tone with thin layers. The color is so real, you know? It’s not just ‘flesh-colored’ paint, but a mix of greens, yellows, pinks, all working together. Look at the boy’s hair – each strand seems carefully placed. There's a tension in the painting between the delicacy of that detail and the rawness of the face. He really gets under the skin of his subjects. And that’s what’s so amazing about painting – it’s a process of looking, of getting to know someone or something, and then finding a way to put that down on canvas. It reminds me of another painter Chaim Soutine, the way the brushstrokes are thick with feeling. Both artists show us that a painting is never really finished, it’s just a moment in an ongoing conversation.