Palm Tree 1944

Lucian Freud made this drawing of a Palm Tree, at an unknown date, with ink on paper. It’s just so direct and unsentimental; look at that spiky foliage! There’s a real simplicity in the way he’s used ink to describe form and texture. He really gets the wiry toughness of the leaves. The linework is so precise, but there’s still this feeling of vulnerability, especially in the thinness of the trunk. I love the way he’s left parts of the paper blank, so the tree seems to emerge from the nothingness. See how he’s built up the trunk using tiny, almost obsessive marks that somehow give it a really solid, three-dimensional presence? It reminds me of some of Alex Katz's flat, reductive paintings. Both artists share a similar interest in observation and a kind of pared-down realism. Art is just about looking, and drawing, and making marks, over and over.