Francis Bacon’s style was so personal and distinctive that his influence lay more in the intensity of his commitment to art itself than in any direct stylistic legacy. The British artist developed a way of portraying the human body that was unique in the history of painting—usually in isolation, at moments of extreme tension or even pain, distorted like figures from a fantastical nightmare.He began as a designer of innovative modern furniture, but soon developed his style as a painter, his themes drawn partly from war, terrorism, gory accidents - these fleeting instants of agony fascinate Bacon.As he launched his painting career Bacon's canvases seemed to many to be ghastly views into torment, half-decomposed portraits of things better left unpictured.
He never went to art school, his lack of formal training was a handicap he turned to advantage. Uninhibited by drawing skills or rules of composition, he painted simply for effect.His early paintings, look cramped and underdeveloped, as though bred in captivity. That is their great quality.
He worked not just with brushes, but with rags and rakes and sprays. He sometimes squeezed tubes of paint into his palm, flinging the paint at the canvas with one gesture of his hand.He used paint to access the ravages of the human spirit, chronicling the pointlessness of the quest for meaning in lurid colours and violent textures. As a gambler and drinker, Bacon was always short of finances. Thus, he reused canvases, incorporated discarded materials and often integrated the dirt and chaos of his studio into his pieces, but as a compulsive perfectionist, he destroyed more of his paintings than he finished.
What Bacon was after was something deep. He wanted to make the body the visible sign of the eternal devils of human nature, the dog beneath the skin that bares its fangs in war and in bed.
His great gift was for conflation, visual and psychological, for compressing multiple possibilities into a single sliding form.He remains a towering example to those dedicated to the depiction of the human figure and tortured souls.
Francis Bacon documentary(part 1/6):
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