Woman With Faraway Look in Her Eyes Art Drawings

Lucian Freud and Sue Tilley: The story of an unlikely muse

(Prototype credit:

Tate photography, Joe Humphrys

)

Lucian Freud'southward paintings of benefits supervisor Sue Tilley set records at auction houses. She tells Cameron Laux what it was like to sit for one of Great britain'south greatest artists.

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One of Lucian Freud's more famous paintings depicts a fertility goddess having a nap on her sofa. She is naked and seems to be deep in unguarded slumber (her face is partly squished and she looks similar she might be drooling). Despite this, she is majestic; she has curves on her curves, and they phosphoresce gently in shades of brown, pink, and white. How did the artist sneak upwardly on her? Will he survive her wrath when she wakes upwardly?

Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) broke records when it was sold to Roman Abramovich in 2008 for £17 million ($33.6 meg) (Credit: Lucian Freud Annal/Bridgeman Images)

No need to worry. For one matter, the goddess isn't really asleep: Freud painted her in that pose in sessions spread over many months – he liked to pigment from life, and he was fussy, layering and working oil paint until it looks similar slathered mud. But for another, the goddess isn't actually a goddess: she is Sue Tilley, at the time working as a supervisor in a government Jobcentre in London (the title of the painting is Benefits Supervisor Sleeping), and she is equally generous on the inside every bit she is on the exterior.

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In person, Tilley has a lot of presence, and you lot realise that Freud's paintings tap into this. She was in her 30s in the paintings; she is 60 now. She is very kind, dead honest, quick to smile. She has the startling sophistication of someone who has been effectually the cake a few times. And what a cake.

Tilley was close friends with the Australian operation artist and club promoter Leigh Bowery – here photographed with his parents Evelyn and Thomas, 1984 (Credit: Sue Tilley)

Tilley led a Technicolor life long before she met Freud: she was shut friends with the 'total' creative person Leigh Bowery and when she wasn't at her desk in the office she was office of the anarchic clubbing prepare in London in the 1980s, centring on notorious nights with names like Rush and Kinky Gerlinky, simply especially Bowery's own cosmos, Taboo. The latter was one of the wilder and glitzier moments in a decade of egregious moments (polysexual, polysocial, polyeverything), and one of those avant-garde detonations whose effects tin can nevertheless be felt far away in the mainstream.

Wild nights

There is a large literature on the visual genius of Bowery. His exquisitely executed alter egos were nightmarish (in the fecund sense), frequently powerfully sexualised, sometimes purely beautiful, ever resonant. Bowery ignored the boundaries of taste. He was a prodigy in all senses, but perhaps particularly in the old sense of an omen, a falling star streaking across the dark sky. Like so many of the remarkable gay men of that menstruation, he was erased by Aids.

Bowery was also a muse for Lucian Freud; Tilley photographed him (pictured right) with the artist David Holah at her apartment in Camden (Credit: Sue Tilley)

Tilley'due south Instagram account offers a mood board that includes her 80s adventures: she says she didn't consider it a good night unless she'd got drunk enough to fall over at some bespeak. Although Tilley was Dorothy in this Land of Oz, her place in posterity really is guaranteed past a series of four nude portraits which Freud did of her in the late phase of his career. All are probable to remain of art-historical significance.

Freud paid Tilley a small-scale daily fee only she didn't receive any money from the sale of paintings she modelled for (Credit: Alamy)

Of those, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) is probably, and deservedly, the most famous. Evening in the Studio (1993), the starting time of the series, has her sprawled on the floor with a seated girl manifestly disinterested and reading a book in the groundwork. The limerick is an odd combination of domestic scene and crime scene. (Tilley says she was relieved when Freud bought the sofa because it was painful to prevarication on the flooring for hours.)

Benefits Supervisor Resting (1994) depicts Tilley in the corner of the sofa with her caput lolling back, as if she'd just swallowed some poison; a position that could not accept been comfortable either. Finally, in Sleeping by the Lion Rug (1996) Tilley is shown sleeping upright in a chair, facing us. I like that painting because the juxtaposition with the lions in the background suggests that Tilley's grandeur is epic. (Quite true, I'd say.) She hates that painting because she says it makes her await awful.

Freud once revealed: "If I am putting someone in a picture I like to feel that they've fallen asleep in that location or they've elbowed their own way in: that fashion they are there not to make the picture like shooting fish in a barrel on the centre or more pleasant, but they are occupying the space of my pic and I am recording them." This unflinching gaze produced works that resonate securely with viewers. "The chore of the artist," Freud said, "is to make the human existence uncomfortable, and yet we are drawn to a great work of art by involuntary chemistry, similar a hound getting a scent; the domestic dog isn't gratuitous, it can't do otherwise, it gets the smell and instinct does the rest."

All of Freud'south paintings of Tilley are in 'private collections', ie the hands of extremely rich men, capable of paying tens of millions of pounds for the privilege of gazing on her 'flesh' (Freud's word). For instance, Roman Abramovich gear up a then-record for the largest amount paid for a painting past a living artist when he bought Benefits Supervisor Sleeping in 2008 for £17 1000000 ($33.vi million at the time). If yous desire to encounter it, you might desire to go very practiced friends with him. Be prepared to go a Chelsea supporter, because he owns that football society too.

Freud has been chosen an "unrivalled interpreter of man flesh in pigment"; he painted Sleeping by the King of beasts Carpet in 1996 (Credit: Lucian Freud Annal/Bridgeman Images)

Another ane, Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, is on display as part of the evidence All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life, currently on at Tate Britain in London until the terminate of Baronial 2018. That painting is on loan from a billionaire who among other things owns Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Catch it before he hangs it back up in his guest toilet.

Benefits Supervisor Resting, meanwhile, has been described equally "Freud's ultimate bout de strength, a life-size masterwork in the grand historical tradition of the female nude, painted obsessively with intense scrutiny and abiding truth"; when information technology was sold at auction in 2015, Christie's head of postal service-war art Brett Gorvy said that the painting "is recognised internationally as Freud's masterpiece and proclaims him as 1 of the greatest painters of the human course in history alongside Rembrandt and Rubens". Gorvy described the painting as "a triumph of the human being spirit, showcasing Freud'southward dearest of the human being torso", commenting on Tilley that Freud "observed every inch of her with an uncritical eye almost daily for more than nine months".

Benefits Supervisor Resting (1994) has been described equally 'a triumph of the human spirit, showcasing Freud'due south love of the homo torso' (Credit: Alamy)

According to Gorvy, Tilley "is calm and confident, relaxed and comfy in her own skin. She is very much in control, taking on the artist and the viewer. A contemporary take on the Odalisque and the fertility goddess, with her head flung back, she exudes an intriguing ambiguity, implying ecstasy, defiance and the deep breathe of peacefulness." Benefits Supervisor Resting went on to sell for £35 1000000 ($56 million).

None of the money that has rained downward on her representations has made its way to Tilley. When she was posing for Freud he paid her a small-scale daily fee (she told The Guardian that she idea she'd been picked out by Freud as a life model because she represented practiced value for money – "He got a lot of flesh").

Yet, she says, she had the pleasure of his company. She liked him considering he was 'hilarious' and loved to gossip with her. (Tilley met Freud through Bowery, who was also beingness painted by him.) She found Freud'southward mercurial personality fascinating: she says he could be "mean, extremely generous, grumpy, funny, loud, serenity"; also manipulative, only perhaps in a rather charmingly transparent fashion. Grumpy seems to have won out, because eventually he dropped her as a friend after taking offence at an offhand remark she fabricated.

Freud'southward Sleeping by the King of beasts Carpet is currently on show as office of All Too Human being at Tate Britain (Credit: Tate photography, Joe Humphrys)

Freud gave her some etchings, which she sold years agone because she was short of money, but otherwise she has no mementos. She says he didn't phone to say thanks after his start painting of her sold for a large sum of money.

She has a £lx printed copy of Freud's portrait of Leigh Bowery (now in Tate Britain) on the wall of her flat. In 1997 she published Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon, which must be his near definitive biography. It besides captures the London club subcultures of the Bowery era very vividly.

From muse to maker

Tilley has retired from the Jobcentre and moved from London to a tranquility seaside boondocks in E Sussex. Just she is not dozing off. She enjoys frequent visits from artists, creatives, and journalists from around the world who desire to talk about Freud, Bowery, and Tilley. And the walls of her apartment are vibrant with fine art, some of it by friends, simply most by her. She learned how to draw when she was immature so dropped it, but she has recently taken it upwardly again. She is good.

Tilley has been painting for years: this 2016 paradigm shows Trojan, i of the people in Leigh Bowery'southward circle in the 1980s (Credit: Sue Tilley)

Through friends and blow, she ended upwards having a big solo show of paintings and drawings at an east London gallery in 2015. It caught her a piddling by surprise, but got her working flat out to produce pieces to fill up the gallery. Her manner is sketchy, peradventure a little cartoonish, cocky-bodacious. The effect of her anti-aesthetic is charming. She focuses on the personal: portraits of friends, drawings of everyday objects which she sometimes affectionately calls 'boring' but which she loves.

Tilley elaborates on this easygoing universe in a further step in her artistic career: her collaboration with the S/S18 Fendi Men's collection, where luxury apparel and bags are decorated with her pictures of desk-bound lamps, bottle openers, banana skins, cups of coffee. Fendi calls this "corporate escapism" and information technology is undeniably fun; although yous would demand to exist escaping later on light-heartedly robbing a banking concern, since a T-shirt with a drawing of a martini goes for nearly £480. I suppose 1 tin can't really complain, since a painting of Tilley goes for upward of 35,000 times that amount. It is long past time that she got a bigger piece of the action.

Tilley describes this image she painted on a plate as The Benefit Supervisor Has Woken Upwards (Credit: Sue Tilley)

So, onward for Sue Tilley and her remarkable life. At one point she shows me a nude cocky-portrait that she painted on a plate for a clemency auction. The paradigm echoes Benefits Supervisor Resting, except she is sitting upright and alert, her eyes open. She tells me the title is The Benefit Supervisor Has Woken Upwardly. I would say she never went to sleep. Such a pity that Freud isn't alive to sit for her.

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Source: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180514-lucian-freud-and-big-sue-the-story-of-an-unlikely-muse

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