Freud & Hockney Forever!

It's funny that I always take comfort in this crazy painting by Lucian Freud called Eight Legs. It usually hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago and I studied it when I took a painting class the summer right before I got diagnosed with Leukemia.  

It was so nice to see it here on loan at the National Portrait Gallery for the Lucian Freud exhibit.  It's obviously a disturbing painting but Lucian Freud rocked paint so well that I always find myself forgetting about content, with my nose as close to the canvas as I can get (without a guard coming to chastise me).  

His skin is fabric is walls is floor....

It was so apparent after seeing this show how excruciating it was to accomplish these dazzling feats of paint. But in photographs of Freud, it didn't seem excruciating to him! He seemed happy as a clam. In his self-portraits, he depicts himself so handsomely. Way more handsome than anyone else he ever painted! In fact, his models all look like they are in excruciating pain!!!   I read that David Hockney calculated that he sat for Freud for 130 hours while he painted the portrait of him below.  I saw the David Hockney exhibit last week at The Royal Academy. From it, it's clear that David Hockney is a happy guy. He also rocks paint, but in a totally different way.  But Hockney doesn't look like such a happy guy in this portrait that Freud painted at all!! And then I read that in return, Freud sat for Hockney for 2 1/2 hours. Haha!  High maintenance!   

What may have been most inspiring about both the Hockney and Freud exhibits is how these guys just never stopped painting. Hockney is 74 and he is exploring with painting on the iPad and his paint canvases now are more huge than ever and colorful and fantastic.

Freud passed away last summer at the age of 88. The picture below is a painting he was in the middle of when he died. Isn't that refreshing? It was written on the wall next to it that his last brush strokes were of his dog's ear; painted as if alert and listening. I love that!

You know how sometimes there's this idea that things need to be all buttoned up before you die? That that's the way it should be done? Screw that! I think we should all always be in the middle of something. Never plan for death. (Except wills, of course, and all that crap). But as long as you can pick up a paintbrush, tap on a keyboard, even just be read to---stay in the middle of something!

I feel such relief, now that I have a donor, that I never have to consider the concept of planning for death again. No matter what, I won't. Just as Einstein said, "you can't simultaneously prevent and prepare for war".  I think you can't simultaneously plan for death and live life.