Strawberry Fields Whatever: I'm Really Into Louis le Brocquy Right Now

Louis le Brocquy is a painter who I found out about on the Internet five days ago and have quickly fallen in love with. This may come as a huge shock to you, so fasten your seatbelts (I initially wrote that as "hang on to your seatbelts," and sat here staring dumbly at the computer screen trying to figure out why that was wrong for a heartbreakingly long time)- Louis le Brocquy is not from France. He's from Dublin, just like everybody good (I mostly mean James Joyce). What's more, he is a Scorpio, but not even just a normal Scorpio- he's a Scorpio with the same birthday as JEN MAY (!!!). My other favorite painter, Alex Katz, has the same birthday as my mom. So maybe astrology is real after all.

Mr. le Brocquy started out painting normal Lucian Freud-y looking portraits of young people that I find very beautiful. He then progressed into a really weird and cool phase in the 1940s where he started painting sort of vaguely-Cubist Roald Dahl-book-cover-looking illustrations of cartoony-looking people and many babies he called Tinkers. Eventually he became old and amazing and painted these crazy Portrait Heads, which are so detailed and complex I can barely even begin to wrap my head around figuring out whether I like them or not. The James Joyce and Samuel Beckett Portrait Heads are way down at the bottom of this post.

Anyway, here is the Laura Jane Louis le Brocquy retrospective of all my "fav shit" (I'm a philistine) by him. Enjoy!