For Country Life's My Favourite Painting slot, the writer Emily Howes chooses a work by a daring and challenging artist: Frank Auerbach. ‘I am an Auerbach devotee; I can’t look away. I’m captivated by the slide and shift of the paint.
Here, he finds something essential about the quality of the human experience. ‘The portrait is thick with feeling; something in his relationship with paint itself, to its viscosity and its sensuality, expresses a melancholy that catches me. He said painting is the most marvellous activity humans have invented and I can feel that marvelling in every brushstroke.
‘He is so alive as a painter and it works as all brilliant art does at the glorious meeting place of what lies inside us and what we perceive beyond ourselves. I love paintings that tell me a story or show me beauty, but when I look at Auerbach, I feel.’ Emily Howes is the award-winning author of The Painter’s Daughters (Phoenix) Sitting for Frank Auerbach is not something lightly undertaken.
Few people have been invited to pose for him in his studio in Camden, north London, and those that have must turn up week in, week out. A single painting can take years to complete and the result will not be a material likeness. Instead, Auerbach uses the structure and form of a head as the armature for his paint.
He was born in Berlin in 1931, but was sent to England in 1939 (his parents subsequently died in the Holocaust). Aged 16, he moved to London to study art under David Bomberg a.