His hobby was reading people. Some people wondered why he would sit with a young girl, a model or one of his grandchildren and not speak much. It was because his eyes were swivelling round reading people’s movements and looks. It was what he did professionally,’ said Doherty.
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He could take major events or small episodes from daily life and shade or exaggerate things in such a way as to capture their shape and substance, capture what life felt like in the society in which he and his friends lived and worked and bred. People looked to him to put into words what was going on.
But while in the early days his opinions would swing wildly and his delivery could be abrupt, he became more articulate and observant of people’s feelings as time went on. He learned to read the room, demonstrating skills that, years earlier, I didn’t think he had. Some people have said that he got mellower with age, but I don’t think that’s an adequate description of what happened; it sounds too passive, as if he just was letting more go. Steve’s transformation was an active one. He continued to engage; he just changed the way he went about it.
He was entrenched in life-study portraiture and he made it provocative. ‘It is the only point of getting up every morning: to paint, to make something good, to make something even better than before, not to give up, to compete, to be ambitious,’ he said.
He made most things sound or seem less ordinary, be it the cut or shape of a lapel, or his thoughts on love, or even spinach: ‘I can imagine that if a woman I was in love with cooked spinach with oil, I would also enjoy the slight heroism of liking it, although I didn’t usually enjoy it served that way.
He was on the threshold of his ‘disturbing’ or ‘hallucinatory’ period, which led Herbert Read, the critic and co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, to describe him as ‘the Ingres of existentialism’. It was a compliment that Lucian enjoyed, Ingres being one of the painters he most admired.