Through my drawing project I've been looking at various artists who concentrate their works on the nature of people and one that really stood out to me is Francis Bacon.
His figurative paintings are worryingly brilliant and show scenes of terror, discomfort and what can only be described as torture, both mental and physical.
To understand his works we need to look at his life and what drove him to make the paintings he did.
He was a very complicated individual, constantly battling with his addiction to gambling, alcoholism and the publics un-accepting view towards his homosexuality. But as sad as all this seems it all worked in his favour towards making his paintings.
Born in Dublin in 1909 his family moved to London in 1914 and by 1949 he'd started his series of 'Screaming Popes' paintings and in 1954 he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biannale.
His three paintings of Lucien Freud were the most expensive paintings ever sold and fetched an amazing $142 Million Dollars to the sister of Quatar's Emir.
'Three Studies of Lucien Freud', 1969.
Bacons paintings are so interesting and intriguing to me.
The confusion of each face or body, the vivid background colours and the dark areas interrupted by slashes of light make them visually eye-catching to any observer.
'Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X', 1951.
'study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X' was painted by Bacon in 1951 and shows the pope sitting in the centre of the canvas on a large golden coloured throne which is the first thing we notice when first seeing the image. The throne seems more like a cage or trap, keeping the pope imprisoned with its hard thick yellow stripes. It reminds us of Warhol's 'Little Yellow Chair' a painting showing a solitary electric chair in a prison. The pope could almost be tied to it at the wrists and close inspection reveals his tightly gripped hands clutching the chairs frame as if the electricity is already flowing.
His ghostly figure wears the same purple and white outfit but we see through the clothing to the backdrop, more of a disappearing apparition than a person.
The backdrop itself is scrawled onto the canvas in downward strips of dark greys and blacks that appear to have been applied in a rage or through anger like Bacon was attacking the canvas and the straight lines could be prison bars or more likely a set of dark closed curtains stopping the daylight coming in or denying anyone looking at the pope.
The face is screaming, terror filled and tortured, screaming something at us or at something he's witnessing? The black deep mouth hangs wide open with purple lips and is almost skeletal like. The eyes are purple smears with dark black circles directly underneath and he has the look of someone recently deceased.
In religious ceremonies the priest or pope can sometimes splash holy water onto someone as a blessing but in this painting we see the same thing has happened only the holy water is actually blood splatters across the foreground of the image. These could be a sign of the artists hatred of what the figure symbolises or a symbol of the loss of blood from religion.
This painting is the total opposite of what we see in Velazquez's painting. This figure is strong in a different way and it frightens us with whats happening to it and what it means. Why is he screaming and why is he disappearing? Is it the end of religion or a comment from Bacon on the church and homosexuality?
Like the man himself we will never fully understand what the painting is saying but fully and deeply understood or not these paintings are amazing to view and will be a great inspiration to many artists in the future.
'The man that paints those dreadful pictures' A quote by Margaret Thatcher, died in madrid in 1992 of cardiac arrest after an asthma attack.
No comments:
Post a Comment