The Bite Magazine - Spring/Summer 2025 - Issue 37

Jada Brookes discovered Lucian Freud’s etchings in an exhibition at Titanic Belfast, which was organised in collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum. Titanic Belfast Lucian Freud’s Etchings: A Creative Collaboration biteexhibition L ucian Freud, one of the most celebrated British artists of the 20th century, was renowned for his deeply introspective and psycholog- ically intense portraits. He famously stated he “paints people, not because of what they are like, not exactly [despite] what they are like, but how they happen to be.” His work is often characterised by thick impasto and an unflinching gaze, capturing the raw essence of his subjects. While best known for his paintings, his etchings reveal another dimension of his process. Born in Berlin in 1922, he was the grandson of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanal- ysis. His family fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and settled in Britain. This early displace- ment and exposure to psychological theory may have influenced his intense focus on the human condition. Freud frequently revealed insights into his meticulous meth- ods and the importance of observation and personal connection. “The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and ironically, the more real.” His artistic career began in the 1940s when he studied at the Central School of Art and later at the East Anglian School of Paint- ing and Drawing. His early works bore the influence of surrealism, but by the 1950s, he had developed a distinctive style focusing on the human form with an almost forensic intensity. Their raw honesty marked his portraits of close friends and family. Freud’s