HEAD OF JAKE
FRANK AUERBACH, 2006-07
It looks like it took about twenty minutes. One stroke for the mouth. A dash for an eye. A ridge of paint where the nose goes. The dark red lines do the drawing. Cheek, jaw, chin. The shoulders are one big cream sweep. Fast enough to still look wet. A head, about life-size. You can nearly count the marks. The date says 2006 to 2007. So where did a year of painting go? Auerbach painted in the same Camden studio most of his life. Went in nearly every day. And the same few people came to him. Same day, same hour, week after week. Some of them for forty years. At the end of a sitting, he'd look at what he had. If it wasn't right, he scraped it off. All of it. Down to the canvas. Next week, same person, start again. The head you're left with is the last one. The one he didn't scrape. The scrapings just piled up around the easel. Now. The sitter. Jake is his son. And when Jake was a kid, they didn't see each other at all. Twelve years. They met again in 1976. Then Jake started coming to the studio. Same day, same hour. He kept that slot for decades. Sat still while his father painted him, scraped him off, and painted him again. A year of those sittings came down to this one head. Almost none of the others survived. The appointment did.