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Auerbach paintings?

how long did auerbach take to paint his main paintings ie the head of julia and Head of E.O.W?


Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: It took him at least one year and hundreds of sittings to paint Each of them .
He painted 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Forever he paints.
Auerbach's work is spectacularly claustrophobic, rarely casting its gaze further than those few Camden landmarks. He laboriously paints and repaints only a select group of favoured sitters, some of whom have been making the pilgrimage to his door, at the same time each week, for decades. Auerbach himself rarely ventures outside the bespattered cordon thrown up by his brush, and has made just a few, brief trips abroad since arriving from Germany as a Jewish refugee in the 30s: "I don't think that I've been out of London for five weeks ever since I got here."

From this limited orbit, though, he manages to unleash a heaving torrent of imagery, spun out of the heaviest, most tactile masses of paint ever flung at canvas. Some of his early works, such as E.O.W. Nude, 1953-54 and Head Of Leon Kossoff, 1954, look less like depictions of living models than human remains excavated out of mucky, oily silt. Even his landscapes of Mornington Crescent and Primrose Hill seem like scarred battlefields of pigment. "I have to begin with a lump in my mind," runs one of his central principles.

He is also an obsessive perfectionist and has been known to buy back and destroy an inferior painting, sometimes years after completion. In his youth, he would compulsively work and rework an image, clawing away unworthy fragments and burying unsatisfactory versions deep in the endless layers of paint. But now, after each sitting, he mercilessly scrapes everything down so that there is just the shadow of an image left for the next: "It is a bit disturbing," says David Landau, who has sat for Auerbach since 1984, "particularly on those occasions when you remember from the last time that the painting was quite good. You think this was a really beautiful picture and yet it wasn't good enough for him. Next time you arrive it will be a scraped-down ghost."

Auerbach worked tortuously, with some of the early works taking hundreds of sittings to complete: "It was quite an ordeal, because he would spend hours on something and the next time he came he would scrape the whole lot down. That used to upset me terribly. I wondered what I was doing it all for."
However, the intensity of the relationship spilled over into the work, producing the startling Head Of E.O.W. of 1954-55 and the E.O.W. Nude of 1953-54, paintings so earthy that they look as if they have risen from primordial sludge. In 1955, these works featured in Auerbach's Royal College of Art graduation show, catching the eye of Helen Lessore of the Beaux Arts gallery. She offered Auerbach his first solo exhibition the following January.

Auerbach remembers that some of the paintings were so heavy and encrusted that they required a team of two or three people to hang them. Later, Lessore was forced to exhibit his work flat, for fear that the mucky paint would simply slide off the canvas and on to the floor. "The thickest paintings one is ever likely to see," wrote critic John Russell after the show opened in 1956. "There seems at present to be some sort of competition going on among young artists," concurred the Manchester Guardian, "to find out who can put on his canvases the heaviest load of treacly paint."
More detailed descriptions on this next site;
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/a...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/archive/articl... -Julia
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/stor...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/frank_auerb...
http://www.leninimports.com/auerbach_bio...
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/critic/featur...
http://www.answers.com/painter%20auerbac...