Quotes

You see, painting has now become, or all art has now become completely a game, by which man distracts himself. What is fascinating actually is, that it's going to become much more difficult for the artist, because he must really deepen the game to become any good at all.

An illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

I don’t think people are born artists; I think it comes from a mixture of your surroundings, the people you meet, and luck.

I paint for myself. I don’t know how to do anything else, anyway. Also I have to earn my living, and occupy myself.

I need the city; I need to know there are people around me strolling, arguing, f**king—living, and yet I go out very rarely; I stay here in my cage.

I should have been, I don’t know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance.

All artists are vain, they long to be recognised and to leave something to posterity. They want to be loved, and at the same time they want to be free. But nobody is free.

Some artists leave remarkable things which, a 100 years later, don’t work at all. I have left my mark; my work is hung in museums, but maybe one day the Tate Gallery or the other museums will banish me to the cellar…you never know.

Painting gave meaning to my life which without it it would not have had.

Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint.

Picasso was the first person to produce figurative paintings which overturned the rules of appearance; he suggested appearance without using the usual codes, without respecting the representational truth of form, but using a breath of irrationality instead, to make representation stronger and more direct; so that form could pass directly from the eye to the stomach without going through the brain.

Picasso was one of that genius caste which includes Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Van Gogh and above all Velázquez.

Velázquez found the perfect balance between the ideal illustration which he was required to produce, and the overwhelming emotion he aroused in the spectator.

Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people’s plates.

Before I start painting I have a slightly ambiguous feeling: happiness is a special excitement because unhappiness is always possible a moment later.

You could say that I have no inspiration, that I only need to paint.

The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure; it’s a little like making love, the physical act of love.

Works on Paper

Over seventy works on paper were found in Bacon's Reece Mews studio and these are now in the collection of the Hugh Lane Gallery. They are among the most important discoveries of the project. In all the interviews Bacon gave from around 1962 onwards, he denied that he made any preparatory drawings before he started to paint. Some of his close friends knew that he produced drawings and even owned some of these works, but they followed Bacon's wish to keep them out of the public domain. The Hugh Lane collection of drawings is one of the most comprehensive and provides a good record of the type of works Bacon was producing from the 1930s to the 1980s. Collectively, they provide new perspectives on Bacon's thought processes and working methods. All the works are unsigned and most are undated. Most are monochromatic. Some can be related to finished paintings whereas with others the links are more tenuous.

Materials

Some two thousand samples of Bacon's painting materials were found in the Reece Mews studio. These include hundreds of used paint tubes, jars of loose pigment, paintbrushes, utensils, tin cans, sticks of pastel, pieces of fabric, empty bottles of turpentine, cans of spray paint and of fixative, tins of household paint and countless roller sponges. No artist's palette was found in the studio and the artist appears to have used just about anything he could find as a substitute. Even the walls of the studio itself were used to mix and test paints. From early on in his artistic career, Bacon tried out various materials in his paintings including aerosol cans of car paint, sand, pastel, dust and cotton wool. He also appears to have applied paint with the plastic lids from paint tubes and the open ends of bottles found in the studio.

Several pairs of thick corduroy trousers were found in the studio. Many of these were cut up into pieces, which Bacon used to pattern his paintings. The imprint of corduroy is evident in many of his paintings, including Study for Portrait of John Edwards, 1989. Imprints from corduroy are also evident on the door of the Reece Mews studio suggesting that Bacon applied paint to the door, printed the corduroy and then applied it to the canvas. Bacon also used cashmere sweaters ribbed socks and cotton flannels to similar effect. Three towelling dressing gowns were also found in the studio. It is possible that Bacon used these to print onto canvas also.

Cut-out arrows are amongst the surprise discoveries in Bacon's studio. The thick deposits of paint on both sides of these arrows suggest that Bacon used these either to paint around or else to imprint the shape of an arrow directly onto the canvas. Two cut-out heads of George Dyer, one in colour and one in black and white have been found in the studio. Due to the presence of a number of pin holes in these items and the paint around the outlines, it seems likely that they were used to trace the profile on to the canvas.

Photographs by John Deakin

The photographs of Vogue photographer John Deakin (1912-1972) were particularly important to the artist and over 120 Deakin photographs and a collection of negatives have been found in the Reece Mews studio. Many of these were used as the basis for Bacon's portraits of George Dyer, Peter Lacy, Henrietta Moraes, Isabel Rawthshorne and Lucian Freud. While some of the photographs are in poor condition, their visual impact is still enormous. Many have heavy accretions of paint, and some are torn, crumpled or distorted and held in place with paperclips. Bacon was acutely aware of the way smudged fingerprints and footprints could change an image irrevocably.

Photographs

Photography played a major role in Bacon's work, and almost one quarter of the material found in the studio is of a photographic nature. Many of these photographs are of Bacon, his friends and various other subjects. During his lifetime, Bacon accepted only a handful of commissions. From the early 1960s he chose his closest friends as sitters, preferring to work not from life but from their photographs.

Slashed Canvases

One hundred slashed canvases were found in Bacon's studio. The larger ones were stacked up against the walls and windows, while some of the smaller ones were found piled on shelves or discarded on the floor. These works, although destroyed, often show what a Bacon canvas looks like before completion. His unorthodox techniques are revealed in their raw state. The practice of destroying canvases is not unusual among artists. Apparently, Bacon destroyed the small works himself and John Edwards destroyed the larger ones at Bacon's request. The slashed canvases span some five decades of the artist's career, with the earliest known work dating from around 1946. In most cases, a painting was taken to a relatively advanced stage before a canvas was destroyed.

Over half the canvases found in the Reece Mews Studio are in a small format (approximately 35.5cm x 30cm). Some were used as palettes or have initial preparatory layers, whereas others have portrait studies in varying degrees of completion. The artist may have used other canvases to test paint colours and techniques or possibly to clean his brushes. The human figures in Bacon's paintings tend to be two-thirds to three-quarters life size so the majority of his large paintings are of full-length figures. Consequently, the smaller paintings tend to be of heads. However, the head area of every portrait study found in the studio, has been cut out. As the images generally only show a small area of the neck, edges of the face and head, it is frequently difficult to identify the sitter.

His Studio

"English painter of Irish birth. Francis Bacon came to London in 1925 and although he received no formal art training, he created a sensation in 1945 when he exhibited his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (London, Tate Gallery) at the Lefevre Gallery in London. His work was Expressionist in style, and his distorted human forms were unsettling. He developed his personal style and gloomy subject matter during the 1950s, when he achieved an international reputation. Aside from his unpleasant images of corrupt and disgusting humanity, Bacon deliberately subverted artistic conventions by using the triptych format of Renaissance altarpieces to show the evils of man, rather than the virtues of Christ. In Pope Innocent X he reworked a famous portrait by Velazquez into a screaming mask of angst."

- From The Bulfinch Guide to Art History

Francis Bacon's Studio (taken from http://www.hughlane.ie/fb_studio/studio.html )

7 Reece Mews
South Kensington
London

In 1998, John Edwards, Bacon's sole heir, generously donated the entire contents of Francis Bacon's studio at 7 Reece Mews to the Hugh Lane Gallery. This remarkable donation is the most important received by the Gallery since it was established by Sir Hugh Lane in 1908.

Francis Bacon lived and worked in 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington, London from 1961 until his death in 1992. The studio / residence was one of a short row of converted coach houses on a quiet cobble-stoned lane. The house was small and utilitarian in layout. The ground floor was almost entirely occupied by a large garage where Bacon kept surplus items from the studio. An extremely steep wooden staircase, with a rope for a handrail, led to a landing. On the left was Bacon's spartan bed-living room. Ahead was an eccentric kitchen-cum-bathroom. To the right was the studio, the most important room in the artist's life. Bacon said himself of his cluttered studio, "I feel at home here in this chaos because chaos suggests images to me." Bacon rarely painted from life and the heaps of torn photographs, fragments of illustrations, books, catalogues, magazines and newspapers provided nearly all of his visual sources. Some of the most significant studio items include seventy works on paper and one hundred slashed canvases. The vast array of artist's materials, household paint pots, used and unused paint tubes, paint brushes, cut-off ends of corduroy trousers and cashmere sweaters record the diversity of Bacon's techniques. It is from here that Bacon's stature grew into that of the pre-eminent figurative painter of the late 20th century. While Bacon occasionally looked for a new, grander place to work, he continually returned to this awkward but familiar room

Telegraph Article

A fresh side of Bacon

A corking show of Francis Bacon's portraits and heads at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, organised in association with the British Council, reveals a side of Bacon's work we've never seen before.

Instead of the histrionics of the large triptychs and the screaming popes, it focuses on Bacon's most intimate work - his studies of his lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer, of friends Muriel Belcher and Isabel Rawsthorne, and of fellow painters Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud.

This is Bacon the private and complex man, capable of surprising tenderness and affection as well as of cruelty and spiked wit. Above all, the narrow focus of the exhibition allows us to concentrate on the way Bacon actually lays paint on the canvas, and not, as is so often the case when looking at his work, on the existential subject matter.

Whether or not he painted directly from the model, Bacon normally based his portraits on photographs. In display cases placed along the corridor linking the galleries, photos of his sitters reveal that no matter how he distorts a face, Bacon was usually able to capture a remarkable likeness.

But, instead of covering his faces with an epidermis of flesh, he excavates parts of them, using concave sweeps of brilliant colour to define the planes of cheekbones and forehead, while filling in other parts with a single stroke of the brush for a nose or a chin. In some of the heads, his technique is almost like that of a cubist, in others he reminded me of a sculptor working soft clay with his thumbs.

nd what a range of emotion Bacon can achieve within a limited format! When he paints George Dyer, the face comes out bruised and swollen, like a prizefighter after a match, as though, for Bacon, the act of painting were a substitute for what he would otherwise do with his fists.

But in a portrait of Peter Lacy sleeping there is a sweetness and protectiveness that you don't find elsewhere in Bacon's work. In general, the more handsome the man, the more viciously Bacon treats him. In a double portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, the poor artists come out looking like the masked women in the Demoiselles d'Avignon.

What is Bacon doing in these portraits? One answer is that he is searching for the essence of the person, that elusive and constantly changing element that is an individual's identity. But it is more complicated than that. The way paint is dragged in striations across the faces in certain portraits could also be a way of suggesting physical movement, or it might evoke the idea of a doubly-exposed photograph.

And for every brushstroke that builds up form, another seems to shatter it, as though the portrait were the arena in which Bacon can work out his conflicting feelings of affection and hatred for the person he is painting.

These heads are painted directly on the canvas without preliminary drawing, so that the image and the technique are inseparable. In Bacon's own words, "the brushstroke creates the form and does not merely fill it in".

In his portrait Miss Muriel Belcher he applies paint with a loaded brush to create a surface as richly impastoed as in a Rubens sketch, dipping his brush in more than one colour, then dragging it in short, striated strokes of green mixed with pink. He then stains the background with two tones of thinned green paint to suggest the space in which Belcher exists.

In these small-scale works, Bacon had no difficulty sustaining the interest of the painted surface from edge to edge as I feel is often the case in the large-scale subject pictures. This show reveals a Bacon that I, for one, didn't know at all. See it if you possibly can.

The Bacon show coincides with a small exhibition of the work of his friend Graham Sutherland at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

After his death in 1980, the reputation of a man once considered one of this country's pre-eminent painters sank like a stone. There were two reasons for this, and both were unfair: we tended to judge him by his later work, and also to compare him with contemporaries who worked in the international modernist style - with Bacon, of course, but also with Picasso and Giacometti.

Technique

What is truly fascinating and brilliant about Francis Bacon's technique/work is that he had no formal training. One can see his roots as a furniture designer in his work, his confident spacial structures and lines that describe the setting for his subject.
In terms of technique, he only improvises, learning mainly through trial and error which gave him such an intimate understanding of his tools and media that his creations can appear to be spontaneous and carefree. But this 'carefree-ness' is more often than not an illusion. Though he rarely made any preparations for his work it becomes more and more apparent on acquaintance with his works that, whether intuitively or consciously, he was obsessively involved the structure and appearance.

A Few Examples of Bacon's Work

Quotes from Essays on Francis Bacon - Short Summary of Bacon and His Work

WEB OF IMAGES by DAWN SANDERS

"Bacon has always found this (the 'horrific' elements of his work) and irrelevant problem, denying that he ever intended to be 'horrific'. Yet he has, on the other hand, admitted that violence was central to his art."

"Others, still with the effect of making the paintings 'reflect' horror or violence in the world, describe it as mirroring the alienation and misery of mid-twentieth century man"

" 'This violence of my life, the violence which i've lived amongst, I think it's different to the violence in painting. When talking about the violence of paint, it's nothing to do with the violence of war. It's to do with an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself. And the violence of reality is not only the simple violence meant when you say that a rose or something is violent, but it's the violence also of the suggestions within the image itself which can only be conveyed through paint.' (- Francis Bacon) The main points here are, first, that violence in painting has nothing to do with illustrating violence; second, that the violence he is talking about can only be realized in a painted image.; third, that it is not to do with the violent application of paint, with 'expressionist' violence, but comes out of 'suggestion within the image itself'. "

" 'Illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into fact.' The opposition between intelligence and sensation is crucial for Bacon. Sensation may include intelligence but the intellect can bypass sensation. Bacon wants his painting to operate primarily through sensation, otherwise it becomes a mere vehicle: 'I want very, very much to do the thing that Valéry said - to give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. And the moment the story enters, the boredom come upon you.' "

"Bacon considers abstract painting to be a wholly aesthetic thing, and any 'visceral' response we may claim to to it is, he robustly asserts, just 'fashion'.

"There is no real precedent for the kind of tightrope walk he enacts between abstraction and figuration. The point is that he is trying to keep the 'recording' character of painting without slipping into illustration or story telling."

"The elements of his painting can be isolated as follows: there is the material ground (the surface structure of the painting), there is the figure itself, and there is the setting of siting f the figure, more or less allusively established, and sometimes, performing no more than a function of holding or isolating the figure. "

"Distortion, fragmentation, isolation then, are on one level the result of a pictorial battle against illustrative figuration, against a type of representation aimed solely at the intelligence. In his frequent uses of photographs - photography of almost any kind - the implications of these distortions can be seen as an attack on the too simple, too restricted, 'too ordered, too coherent' picture that photography 'gives of the interaction between man and his environment or one man and another', or indeed, of a single person"

" 'When I look at you across the table,' he says to his interviewer David Sylvester, 'I don only see you but I see a whole emanation which has to do with personality and everything else. And to put that over in a painting, as I would like to be able to do in a portrait, means that it would appear violent in paint. We nearly always live through screens - a screened existence. And sometimes I think, when people say my work looks violent, that I have from time to time been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.' "