Head of Laurie Owen I is a monumental depiction of the human head. The figure is scaled larger than life size and is tightly cropped to the edges of the sheet, straining at the boundaries of the support. The shapely volumes of the head are indicated by long rhythmic sweeps of the brush laid in parallel like the hatching of a pencil. An armature of grey-black accent lines sweeps around these volumes, at once pinning the head to the support and behaving as descriptions of outline and facial detail. The sitter is turning his head to one side but the extent of the turn is ambiguous; it is unclear if he is viewed from behind or from the right. The handling of his profile at the right-hand edge of the work accommodates both readings. In the course of making, a second sheet of paper was affixed along the right-hand edge, further expanding the picture plane to accommodate the figure as it grew and settled into position.

Until the early 1970s, Auerbach had no systematic working method. ‘I was so unsure of what I wanted to do. I felt I would really be throwing the whole painting away if I scraped it all off, so I would always leave some of it on and scrape some of it off’. Only with the growing alignment in his use of charcoal and oil paint did a coherent approach start to emerge, and the notion of ‘drawing in paint’ took hold. He later said that ‘[p]ainting is drawing in slabs rather than edges, but it’s all drawing to me.’ Nowhere was this alignment clearer than Auerbach’s burgeoning use of paint on a paper support. Though he occasionally used this combination in the 1960s, it was not until 1971 that he introduced colour for more than just the accents. These works in oil on paper occupy a zone between drawing and painting. Some were begun as drawings and only later came to include oil or acrylic. Since that time a continuum has existed between Auerbach’s paintings and drawings, with both belonging to a single integrated practice.

Laurie Owen was an artist when Auerbach knew him. Four pictures were made of him between 1971 and 1973, all of them in oil on paper. The first in 1971 showed him in a three-quarter-length view with his head tilted forwards; the second in 1972 used a frontal view (fig. 1); and the last two closely related works, including Head of Laurie Owen I, are dominated by the back of his head, the profile apparently turned away but still visible at the right-hand side.

There are subtle but essential differences between Head of Laurie Owen I and Head of Laurie Owen II, both of which were made in 1973. Though the angle and massing of the head are repeated, each work has particular emphases and accents. A broken but continuous outline of the head is used in the second, while Head of Laurie Owen I evokes the volume of the hair and skull in a sequence of parallel strokes. Auerbach has often made a pair of portraits in quick succession. ‘A few paintings come off quickly: almost always a second attempt at something that I had worked on for a long time.’ Aside from the two portraits of Owen, other examples from the early 1970s include pairs of Renée Fedden, Stephen Finer and Sandra Fisher.

Shortly after it was completed, Head of Laurie Owen I was exhibited in Frank Auerbach’s 1974 solo exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art. It was apparently unsold a decade later when it was exhibited in Milan and said to be owned by Galleria Bergamini – an Italian art dealer which exhibited and sold Auerbach’s work in the 1970s. It was presumably acquired shortly after this by a private collector. The work is currently owned by a distinguished Swiss collection of contemporary art.