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British Painter 1909-92 |
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| Francis Bacon's style is that of a figurative painter bordering on the abstract. He was a magician at conjuring up the
tension between two people on the canvas. He produced disturbing, but at the same time comical paintings. The way he fuses the anatomical bones to the hanging flesh, suggests he studied Gray's Anatomy whilst high on something. But we do know that he owned & took references from Eadweard Muybridge's photographs on movement & was obsessed by pictures of diseases of the mouth. Hence the human scream, a distorted representation of flesh done in a very sculptural form. The canvas format he used was 14x12 inches or 78x58 cm, usually a highly coloured background, Cadmium Red, Cadmium Yellow or Prussian Blue. I first came to like Francis Bacon's paintings in the early 1970s & by the late 1970s I was hooked. The paintings seem to hit directly into the nervous system. I did actually meet him in the 1980s. I say meet; I really bumped into him in Old Compton Street in London's Soho. We just stood & stared at each other without saying anything. He had this enormous jaw & cheeks almost like a hamster's. I've often drawn & painted him, but there's a critical moment in the process where the balance is easily tipped into caricature. So here I was practically standing nose to nose with my favourite painter, & what did I say to him? Nothing. This chance meeting was made all the more coincidental because only a few hours earlier I had bought a book about him. Anybody else would probably have asked him to sign it, but he could be a bit unpredictable & was likely to tell me to piss off if the mood took him, so I declined & moved on rapidly. To get an insight into Francis Bacon & his techniques, I would recommend Daniel Farson's The Gilded Gutter Life Of Francis Bacon & David Sylvester's Interviews With Francis Bacon. For a brief biography of Francis Bacon see the Biographical Notes page. An oil painting of Francis Bacon by Maggi Hambling can be seen in the Sands Gallery at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
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New
'Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt'
the first exhibition devoted to exploring the connections
and influences of Rembrandt's late self-portraits
on Francis Bacon's own self-portraits. At the new gallery called
Ordovas
at 25 Savile Row in London from 7th October to 16th
December 2011. |
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Recent Exhibitions |
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Tate
Britain
Tate St Ives, Cornwall mounted an exhibition called Francis Bacon in St Ives which was on view in 2007. The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, England mounted an exhibition of Francis Bacon's works from the 1950s in 2006. 'Francis Bacon: Portraits & Heads' Presented works by Francis Bacon |
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Barbican Art Gallery - Feb 8 to April 16 2001 London EC2 Bacon's Eye: Works attributed to Francis Bacon from the Barry Joule Archive. |
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There was a combined exhibition at the Hayward Gallery on London's South Bank, which ended on 5th April 1998 of works by Francis Bacon & his long time friend, the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. |
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Recommended Books |
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| My list of recommended books about Francis Bacon may be found in the Francis Bacon section of the Well Furlong Book Shop. If you so wish, you may go on to buy many of the volumes in our Book Shop directly from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Bacon |
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Other Artists |
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Updated 8th October 2011 |
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