Visual Artist: Francis Bacon —

*

*

*

*

*

My favourite artist: Francis Bacon …

‘Champagne for my real friends; and real pain for my sham friends!’

*

Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992)

*

Please visit the excellent Wikipedia Page on Francis Bacon.

*

I have a couple of regrets in life. One of them is never having met my favourite artist before he died. It could have been achieved; he was a creature of habit. Sadly, so was I: we shared the self-destruct inanity— for a good long while in fact —but he harnessed the constructive far far better than I … and, though he was more-or-less based in London and I was more-or-less based not too far away in Glasgow, I failed this desire.

I can’t be sure; but I think Francis Bacon survived the ‘loss’. Now, as my own mortality tips me a wink from not too great a distance, I’ve suddenly become a little bit peeved I didn’t get off my backside.

I have spent years studying his work— the free-form concavities and fit-to-burst striations of human-and-animal, flesh and ghostly bone, juicily-riddled with Life’s isolating anguish (but adopting, with dignity, a comportment near-as-damn balletic) —and I’ve spent as many years reading articles, interviews, and books on this man’s oeuvre. I often, as intimated above, planned to ’stalk’ the bugger in London … his man-oeuvres, ho-ho … but it— as shamefully confessed above —never came to pass.

The ways in which it never came to pass almost define Francis Bacon’s invented gift to the Great Tradition in Visual Art: the deadening explosions and implosions of my own life— usually involving the heart or not being the brightest bulb in the bucket of duds — my concavities and tumescent ‘hells’ — my isolation and vulnerability —always seemed to get in the way when the notion most keenly paid a visit. I’d have loved to have thanked him though: for delighting me, bamboozling me (as another, I now know lesser, artist), making me, and absolving me in equal measure.

The closest I have ever come to a ‘pilgrimage’ was to go see an exhibition at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin city centre (previously called The Municipal Gallery of Modern Art):

In 2001, along with a fantastic display of Bacon’s paintings, photography collection, belongings, and (never before believed to have existed and, back then, inauthenticated) sketches; the gallery reconstructed, brick-by-brick, dust-speck by dust-speck, Bacon’s London studio. This room, to the last detail, had been catalogued and archived … carefully dismantled … preserved … transported to Dublin (where Bacon was born) … then reassembled in one of the Hugh Lane’s gallery studios. The reconstruction was not, I imagine, unlike peeking into Francis’ head as an artist (and the solitary, ascetic, masochistic, nature of the man— maybe, in a way, any man —given to this endeavour). The sorrow, the pain, the drive, the futility, the obvious fire within to expunge— what he needed to express —permeated every nook and cranny and surface beheld.

The view confronting the visitor wasn’t about aspiration or success on any human level we’ve come to associate with the terms— it certainly did not illustrate what many of us would associate with artistic success and how said success was facilitated, attained and subsequently ordered —no: the view was ugly … the view declared— almost accusingly —our intrusion upon an acutely personal, perhaps demented, long-term bout of introspection, and rage, and self-healing, and catharsis, and frenzied bloodletting … a creative and perpetual and emotive cycle of psychological battle, bruise, betrayal and I-don’t-give-a-shit bravura (his valiant howls at the moon so to speak). Beforehand we got to see— and we only got to see —what this artist judged to be a ’success’ … in his eyes alone. He destroyed all of the canvases he deemed to be failures. What this exhibition at the Hugh Lane allowed us to see was how and where these polarities were brought into being. One thing was made glaringly obvious: Francis Bacon’s quest was relentless. His art was pure! It declared a fundamental Truth of what it is to be a human animal.

To somebody a little unfamiliar with this creative zeal; the studio was most definitely a tip … a bombsite. But, my gawd, what a bombsite!

The room could only be viewed, from without, through what were Francis Bacon’s first-floor windows (he lived there too; when not carousing to the cusp of oblivion, or gambling, or ‘cruising’). Had one actually been able to enter the studio, one would have found it increasingly difficult to find or keep footing and purchase. The floor was in a virtual uproar of empty discarded tins (used for mixing turpentine, oil/acrylic paint, and glaze solutions); old scrubbed-to-the-ferrule hog-hair (but bristle-less) brushes; eviscerated oil-paint tubes; stacked or scrunched and trodden photographs, books, magazines and newspapers; paint-smeared jars (paint-smeared everything); hardened rags of corduroy and other charity-shop clothing which Bacon used to impress painted pattern and texture upon his canvases; and the odd bottled testimony to his hard drinking or, alternately, discarded packaging from what can only be described as a diet contrived by the need for convenience. No pretty little neatly-ordered palette … no just out the wrapper smock … no beret!

Bacon liked to paint at night; by the unnatural light of a bare bulb in the centre of the studio’s ceiling. Bacon liked to paint alone: his paintings and portraits were done from memory and photographs. Bacon liked to paint while hungover: gutted with nausea and fractious. Bacon liked edge— a surgical edge — a psychologically debilitating edge —to his creative process. How else could he, I suspect, as he was untrained as an artist, cut through the artifice of Tradition’s banalities and the (then) contemporary’s— to him —meaningless froo-frah? (Bacon continued to paint figuratively throughout the period when Abstraction and Abstract Expressionism and Situationist ‘happenings’ and Pop Art began to introduce us to the first advances of our conceptual epoch. He once said famously that, to look upon the brushwork of Rembrandt was to look upon the birth of Abstract Expressionsim. If you get up close to a Rembrandt; you’ll find it difficult to do much more than concur).

Standing sentry— almost goadingly if such a word exists — at the far-end of his studio —towered the skeletal frame of an easel. Propped upon that easel was one six foot by five canvas … raw and unprimed, like the bloodless greyed ochre of a cadaver: as suited Bacon’s stated and documented technique, but stretched and bearing the first deft strokes of newly-perceived and dilineated form in grey and brown. Sketchy … but not tentative … probing, calligraphic and just so. A few thin and sweeping ’slit’ slices of alizarin crimson suggested the biological and anatomical gore to come.

The only clearing, in the entire floor-space, remained extant in front of this easel. How I wanted to float above the carnage: the angular stressed polythene bags of what could only— surely —be insanity, and the other detritus of Francis’ life, and all the items mentioned before, and place my feet firmly where he had once placed his own. I get that a lot with paintings by the Masters; it is a feeling rarely reported. The odd and disturbing and jubilant impression you are somehow inhabiting another’s body for a time … their space … one arm and one brush length and one phtt of motor neuron messaging away from the possibility of making the same marks. Time negated; so so close to greatness!

I first felt this as a young boy, in London, on a primary school trip from Scotland: Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. I knew I wanted to be an artist by that point and I knew enough about Vincent’s life to— perhaps precociously —make myself aware I was inhabiting a powerful psychological node emanating from that painting. I was filled by the thrill of it. I next became aware of a similar feeling when I, in Aberdeen, first saw a Monet bronze of a ballet dancer. There, at her feet, was a perfect thumbprint resonating from the original clay modelling. I did the verboten … a quick scan left to see if anyone was watching … then a quick scan right … then I took my teenage art student thumb and mimicked the impression. Only one photograph has ever come close to evoking this delusion/kink: a Magnum photographer’s (sorry I can’t recall which) simple study of Muhammad Ali’s clenched fist in black and white. Doesn’t sound too impressive an image I agree … until you read that it’s— to the millimetre —life-size … and I’d defy any man alive, of my generation and before, not to place his own clenched fist on top.

Francis Bacon’s studio was far from black and white. The door and the walls were festooned— to an arms-reach above head-height —with little, and not so little, elliptical splodges of sickly pinks and blues and visceral hues. This was Francis’ palette … a pebble-dashed pointillistic rash— an impetigo —of enamelled and curing pigment and linseed oil.

As the visitor advanced around this studio at the Hugh Lane (really an installation), to take in the separate views from other windows, they would come across a novel and unsuspected addition: placed outside those four walls encasing Francis Bacon’s workspace, and embedded to a great depth in the floor of the Gallery (but covered, for safety, with a thick transparent perspex ’slab’), was a narrow and treacherous-looking flight of worn wooden steps. These were the original steps which led directly from Francis’ front door to the small apartment (and studio) above. There at the bottom was his front door. I was struck by the thought this particular flight of steps would not be a first choice of mine, to ascend or descend, during my own dalliance with drinking to excess.

At the head of this article I supplied a quote of Bacon’s: lifted from a documentary excerpt where he was seen doing some of the aforementioned carousing at one of his favourite London drinking dens. I’ll finish with another quote of his; but I’ll paraphrase a little. When looking at a Francis Bacon painting, imagine both the biological substance and the spiritual essence of a human have been squeezed through the weft and weave of the canvas … the painting— what survives this process —suggests that and only that which matters. If you ever chance upon photographs of his sitters— usually lovers or drinking companions —you will see Francis most definitely caught or implied what mattered. Although some of Francis’ portraits, tryptychs and studies look like they could well have been contrived upon a butcher’s block; they shriek with humanity … they challenge us to dissemble our own psyche … and they fulfil the remit of all Great portraiture and figurative study: they express what resides within; not what masks from without.

He was greatly influenced by the image of the ‘Nurse’ in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin of 1925 (see the first photograph above) … he was compelled to try and capture the human scream of torment which, for him, symbolized so much of both twentieth century history and, in general, the human ‘condition’ … he was also greatly influenced by medical photographs and x-rays. He was never believed— before his death —to have produced or worked from sketches because (as well as claiming this to be the case) he asserted a painting— completed —should bear all the outward hallmarks of a ’sketch’ … to go further was to breach the subject’s essence and produce a figurative illustration: a superficiality.

I touched upon an important aspect of Francis Bacon’s painting technique earlier: the oil paint is applied to unprimed canvas. A serious, but planned, demerit. The reason canvas is primed— with an acrylic- or gesso-based ’skin’ —is to protect the fibres from the chemical changes taking place as the oil (usually linseed because of its slow-drying properties and colour-fast stability) oxidizes to a hard enamel … trapping the pigment, and brushwork, for a significant period. Francis Bacon used unprimed canvas because he preferred the immediate absorbency as the brushstroke was laid down. It informed the marks he made. Those marks were made in the full knowledge he was investing his Art with a major flaw: the canvas— and of course the painting supported by it —will eventually rot and disappear. Given the subject of his Art is entirely human (and a meaty nihilistic jamboree); what a wonderful— and telling —flaw with which to give future generations a sharp dig in the ribs. (I love memento mori)!

He is— if I’ve got to have one; though I’m not the greatest fan of the concept —my hero. He is also— since his death —the reason I get off my backside a little more often these days.

*

Gil Grachison, April 2009.

*

*

~ by Gil Grachison on April 14, 2009.