Word: bacons
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...basic American myth - Jefferson's yeoman farmer, the fantasia of rural righteousness - updated in a crucial way: now Mom works too. Palin's story stands with one foot squarely in the nostalgia for small-town America and the other in the new middle-class reality. She brings home the bacon, raises the kids - with a significant assist from Mr. Mom - hunts moose and looks great in the process. I can't imagine a more powerful, or current, American Dream...
...Hirst also seems to have a second father figure - the painter Francis Bacon, who died in 1992. Hirst says Bacon's bleak, tumultuous work made an impression on him early: "It was like album-cover art. It was gory, high impact. When you're young you love that kind of stuff. But then I started painting, and everything I was painting was kind of shit Bacons, really bad copies. So I gave...
...same, Hirst found early on an equivalent in his own work for Bacon's key motif: tortured figures writhing within a bright, clinical space. Hirst's meticulous glass tanks have some of the same feel about them, sanitary enclosures for something menacing (that shark), visceral (a bisected calf) or even putrid (that cow's head). In recent years Hirst has also begun to absorb Bacon's actual imagery into his tanks of formaldehyde. Two years ago he showed a work derived from one of the anguished triptychs Bacon made after the suicide of his lover George Dyer - with slaughtered sheep...
...last couple of years Hirst has also been painting again - actually painting, as in the kind of pictures an artist produces with his own hand, not through assistants - and always with a sense of Bacon looking over his shoulder. If he continues to go this route it's a big risk. He's given no evidence up to now that he knows what to do with a brush, and there are plenty of people waiting for him to fall on his face...
...hasn't exhibited any of these pictures, but I saw transparencies of some of them in London - figurative work in a dark Bacon-ish key. He's still finding out what kind of painter he is. He's even begun to think of his mass-produced paintings as a means he used to avoid becoming a painter of another kind. "The spot paintings, the spin paintings," he says, "they're all a mechanical way to avoid the actual guy in a room, myself, with a blank canvas...