White bull-terriers

Lucien Freud dissapeared quietly in his home on 20th of July 2011, reaching a satisfying age of 88.

He is undobtedly on of my favourite painters, with whose work I can relate to as I do not especially flatter my subjects or myself either. Though I still have to take a picture of myself with a black eye as he once famously did (after a fight with a taxi driver when he was in his 60s). When I first came accross his work (in 2000, when in Paris I immediately bought a huge album with his nudes and lugged it bravely on the plane home) it was a love at first sight. I like how he is painting but at the same time the distortion is very photographic and the shapes drawn just like with a pencil (that is why I also like Hockney so much because it it not much of a painter but more of a drawing man).

Or I simply like clear outlines because I have enough of blurriness in my life when I take my lenses out...

Or actually it was a white bull-terrier in one of his portraits, the very fist one reproduced in my Paris-bought album. In the painting Freud's first wife Kitty (he was married several times and is said to father at least 20 children! Dan Farson famously said about the painter that 'like Svengali, he mesmerised women into capitulation') has her leg trapped by a cosying white bull-terrier:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucian_Freud

Coincidentally I am reading now Dodie Smith's I capture the Castle . I went and got the book after seeing a picture of Romola Garai who plays the main character in the film adaptation of the novel, sitting next to a white bull-terier in a crowded London cafe. (The name of the dog is not mentioned in the film at all, so to learn that she is called Heloise, you will have to read this excellent book.)

This is how white bul-terriers lead you with their slanty eyes and wet noses into some of the most favourite things in life.