Source: Aesthetica, Family Matters review, May 2012

[https://aestheticamagazine.com/family-matters/]

A light-hearted collage of photographs combines the face of the artist and her father to create unusual fusions of the two into one entity.

Source: Family Matters, Gazelli Art House

‘As the daughter of probably the most famous portrait painter of his generation, Jane’s latest exhibition pays tribute to her beloved father, Lucian. “I am channelling my artistic heritage and focusing on familial relationships. Everything in this exhibition is about the interna; struggle with who I am and what my family represents to me. Family memories of my childhood are defined with positive experiences to do with art.

Source: Freud Museum London, March 2012

[https://www.freud.org.uk/exhibitions/jane-mcadam-freud-lucian-freud-my-father/]

Although a great inspiration to her and a regular presence in her childhood, Lucian Freud became only an occasional figure in his daughter’s life as she grew up; when Jane was eight years old, father and daughter lost contact, only to reconnect when Jane was 31. By then she was a respected artist herself, having established a reputation as a sculptor under the name of Jane McAdam. When they met again, Jane says:

At that time I saw my father regularly and, over about six months, we made sculpture. While we sat for each other, modelling in wax, we chatted a lot and he taught me about light – to work from natural daylight or electric light, but not both at the same time. He taught me what it meant to really concentrate. He looked with every inch of his body, his muscles, and nerves, his whole being. We darted around each other looking at the forms; it was exhausting and demanding – but also enlivening and inspiring.

Some time ago, I asked him if he would sit for me. True to his word, he sat for me very recently. The last time I saw my father was shortly before his death, when I finished the sketches of him. I’ve now used them to make this large portrait sculpture. It helps me to keep him alive.

Jane’s talk:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA5T8_wkF-M

‘When I was young, I do remember my father Lucian Freud watching me and paying particular attention if I was drawing. Because he was quite quiet around us. I think I picked up that was the way to get his attention. I think that made me feel powerful. So the act of drawing meant I had the power over him to connect with him. My father asked me to bring some of the work that i’d made in Rome to show him and he would be very complimentary about certain like he would pick on something and tell me about this and wow look at the way you’ve done that hand. And I can see he was genuinely interested.’

Paddle Your Own Canoe https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NiGyqI8otBoLYwag-pFbmI68Veukgdo4/view?usp=drive_link p.238

Around the time of my father’s illness I made the work ‘Us’ I suppose this was a way of uniting us, at least in an image form. Conversely, it could of course, be seen as me appropriating my father’s persona - as in the work by Marcel Duchamp called L.H.O.O.Q, where Duchamp appropriates Lenardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa for himself. After all, i share both my father and my great-grandfather, and my work is a way of coveting them, having them for myself. Their public and private faces have the same features, yet the face has public ownership. There was a point in my childhood when I realised I shared my father Lucian Freud, As Lucian did with his grandfather Sigmund Freud. Fathers, dead or alive, are your finest motivator and best oppressor and so, making works in that context, i am clearly driven by my internal environment as much as external stimuli.

Grief and its transcendence (Lost wax to lost fathers) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WjPnYYPk1ZSUx1sbLH9ZUU6SUQpazRX/view?usp=drive_link

‘So many people tell me I look like my father and the likeness is something I know. It was so evidence to me in those two photos so I went with it. Everything just fitted into place with no photo editing manipulations. It was one of the most fun, straightforward and painless works I have ever made. It was very comforting working with my dad’s image, especially so putting us together, having him all for me in that sense. In the image he appears as me/mine, and so not shared.’