Art!!!

Francis Bacon

I am reading a book about artists in London in the decades post ww2! this has resulted in my discovering some of the works of francis bacon. lowkey i had never really seen much of his stuff unless you count his studio in the hugh lane. Hopefully I will go back there soon but I am currently so fucking busy. When I'm finished the book i will go. Post berlin. And post All Together Now. God life's relentless.

ANyway. Francis Bacon (an Irishman! gyup) moved to London in like the 40s or some shit because he got kicked out of his family home when he got caught trying on his mother's underwear!! the aul saucy minx. And he ended up living in a sexy gaff with his sugar daddy and his childhood nanny? I thinK? who sorta became like a mother to him idk. And he basically took this space and fucking DESTROYED it with paint becuase he decided suddenly that he wanted to become a painter, despite having no training, which was pretty wild in a London where it seems like fucking everyone was going to drawing schools and learning to paint and draw from the most successful and prolific artists of the time period. Drawing was considered an essential skill for painters, but mr francis Bacon just was not that good at drawing because he never got any lessons. This would have inhibited an artist who did not have Bacon's GENIUS, but instead it just meant that he was fucking CRAZY and slapped paint straight onto his canvases and ended up creating these vivid, horrifying, gutteral, nightmarish paintings!!! They're cool as hell. They're pure existential rage. Here is one of his best early works, Painting, 1946. And you had best believe i am proud of myself for remembering off the top of my head how to do italics on html. I am less proud in that i have no idea how to make this image smaller. But look how cool it is!

This image is very intense. You may be looking at it and thinking, oh christ what a mess. But isn't it just so VISCERAL?? It's at least partly because of Bacon's lack of formal training. His paintings were totally unplanned, and looking at them you really get that sense of the frantic-ness that can only be achieved through the freedom granted by improvisation. The strange conglomeration of elements in the painting (which is very large, it's like six foot or something just like me) are not in their first use by Bacon; the half-face with its gaping, grotesquely real mouth recurs in many of his paintings (I think I'm so fucking great when i can recognise a piece by francis bacon, but i can truly only do so when i see that spine chillingly familiar mouth), as does the umbrella, and the turkish rug we see under the feet of the creepy creepy figure (apparently) bears a striking resemblance to the luxurious, albeit paint-splattered rug that covered the floor of Bacon's sexy London studio apartment. The crucified cow and the butchered lamb surrounding this horror movie nightmare man are likely sprung from a fascination Bacon had with the raw meats he saw in Harrods (nominative determinism at its very best). He said "all painters must admire the beauty of raw meat" or something. That is paraphrased because I don't remember. There's also something interesting to be gleaned from the umbrella coupled with the Mouth TM; Bacon had (for some reason i forget) seen such umbrellas over movie directors, and (also for some reason I can't remember) the inspiration for the open mouth of the faceless subject might somehow be fascist dictators mid-diatribe (remember it's 1946). So I'm sure if I worked hard enough I could distil this painting into some sort of twisted message about contemporary media and how it's the most potent facilitator (or even form, the media is the message after all, right?) of fascism in a post-war world. There's probably some way I could bring in Friedrich Kittler to my discussion, but I am not really bothered to do that rn. I hope he would be proud of me for attempting to get a grasp on the bare minimum of html and for not being deceived by the pretty facade of images on a computer. Although I guess until I can see that even this is all just ones and zeros, I probably will not be truly liberated from this most dangerous medium. Sorry mr Kittler, know that your writings haunt me.

Anyway, I am bored of typing this now. Please don't hold me to anything I've said and also know that I typed this all on the spot and did not read back so I deny any stupidity and/or illiteracy that my incoherence here may suggest. Also all facts and quotes about Francis Bacon in this piece have been made up (this is a cowardly late-occurring disclaimer that I am inserting in order to abscond from criticism).