He painted portraits which have been described as being brutally honest; he did not try to make people look good. He often painted them nude, with the faces staring straight ahead. He used thick layers of paint, impasto, using colours of green, grey and purple, which he blended to with pink to suggest skin color. He was popular for a while in the 1960's, but his work was rediscovered in 1987 after an exhibition in the US. In 2008 his painting “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” was sold for US$33.6 million — the most ever paid for a painting by a living artist. This painting was of a fat nude woman asleep on a couch.