Vanity Fair's Lucian Freud | Literary Review of Canada

marathoning into the night — only so many brushstrokes

left — terre verts mixed with umber — swift swipes

of flake white

brushwork — deft and layered — smooth around the man’s

shoulders — crusty and impassioned

along the arms

every twitch of facial muscle — caught — every bulge

of subcutaneous thigh-fat — whorled

rippled, smeared

soft sable — swapped — for bristly hog’s hair brushes

snipped to nubs — the middle son of the youngest

son of Sigmund Freud

not nudes — his insistence — but naked portraits — “best

realist painter alive” — fathered — with six women

fourteen acknowledged children

there is only — long scarf knotted — so much hypocrisy

rakishly at the neck — I allow myself — work ethic

on overdrive

selfishness — gobs of palette knife wipe-off — is what —

like seagull guano — it takes to make — his studio walls

coated with — great art

my work — big canvases — purely an attempt — unsparing — at a

record — autobiographical — of myself —

and my surroundings

Ruth R. Pierson

Ruth Roach Pierson taught women’s history, feminist and post-colonial studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto from 1980 to 2001, and European and women’s history at Memorial University of Newfoundland from 1970 to 1980. Since retiring she has published three poetry collections: Where No Window Was (BuschekBooks, 2002), Aide-Mémoire (BuschekBooks, 2007), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award in 2008, and Contrary (Tightrope Books, 2011). A fourth, Realignment, will appear from Palimpsest Press in 2015. She is the editor of the anthology of film poems I Found It at the Movies (Guernica Editions, 2014).

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