Word: painted
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sides to me," Bacon explains in a recently published interview with English Art Critic David Sylvester. "I like very perfect things, for instance. I like perfection on a very grand scale. In a way I would like to live in a very grand place. But as in painting you make such a mess, I prefer to live in the mess with the memories and the damage." In photographs of the artist in his studio, we see the most famous English painter of his generation lurking in his lair. The camera flattens the owl-like eyes and avian nose into...
Oval Loops. In the past two decades, Bacon's work has gained immeasurably in its scope of color and plasticity of drawing. With the recent triptychs and other paintings, his ambition to reinstate the human figure as a primary subject of art has been to some degree fulfilled. No other living artist can paint flesh at this pitch of intensity, in this extremity of rage, loss and voluptuousness, or with this command over pigment. His typical setting is familiar: an anonymous oval room. It has tubular furniture, somewhere between a Corbusier couch and an operating table. Sometimes a bare...
...Paint, in Bacon's hands, acquires a strict and intimidating richness. Working in fast oval loops of the brush, he can give the skin of his nudes a kind of granular density, a thickness of imagined substance, that is quite old-masterly. The flesh is loose, but it is all structure too; and when the form beneath it slides away, obliterated by a wipe of the rag, Bacon can instantly tighten the image back with one detail - an eye, a patch of spiky hair like hedgehog quills. To a degree few other painters can rival, Bacon convinces you that...
...youth, the effort to reconcile the truth of outdoor painting with his ambition to make "important pictures" on a Salon scale bore odd results, one of which is Women in the Garden. He set up this vast canvas (over 8 ft. high) in his garden and even had a trench dug to rest it in so that he could paint the top without having to teeter on a stool. Its tonal contrasts between the green gloom of the trees and the crisp white of the girls' dresses in the bleaching sun are a manifesto of early impressionism...
...were buying it for thousands of dollars, it was perhaps only in the hope that the magic moment, the shock of recognition, would come to them. They must have felt there was something profound there, as they must have when they looked at all the other random splotches of paint, stripes, near-empty canvases and soup cans of the fifties and sixties...