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British Painter 1909-92     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.   Exhibition News An exhibition of Francis Bacon's works, the first major retrospective in London since 1985. Tate Britain in London 1st October 2008 - 4th January 2009 Tate St Ives, Cornwall mounted an exhibition called Francis Bacon in St Ives which was open until May13th 2007. An exhibition of Francis Bacon's works from the 1950s was on show at The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, England in 2006. 'Francis Bacon: Portraits & Heads' An exhibition of over 50 of Francis Bacon's portraits were at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2005. Millenium Galleries, Sheffield - in September 2001 Presented works by Francis Bacon   Barbican Art Gallery - Feb 8 to April 16 2001 London EC2 Bacon's Eye: Works attributed to Francis Bacon from the Barry Joule Archive. 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.     Recommended Books 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.   Links Internal Bacon Biographical notes   The life and work of Francis Bacon     Works on Show in UK   A list of galleries in the UK showing Bacon's works      Recommended Books   The Well Furlong Book Shop page dedicated to books by and about Francis Bacon. From there you may buy many of the books online.     Other Artists Lucian Freud   British Artist (1922 -)     Maggi Hambling   British Artist (1945 -)     Walter Sickert   British Artist (1860 - 1942)       External The Francis Bacon Estate   The artist's official website with a biography, examples of his work, exhibition news, bibliography and links.   Hugh Lane Gallery   Francis Bacon's studio can be seen here.   National Portrait Gallery   A Conté drawing of Francis Bacon by Clare Shenstone can be seen on this site.   Tate   The galleries' site lists all of Francis Bacon's paintings that they hold; some of them may be seen online     BBC   Audio extracts of a 1963 interview of Bacon by David Sylvester         Home|Gaynor|Mike|Art|Theatre|Book Shop   Updated 17th February 2008