Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach 1964

This double portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach seems to be made from oil on canvas with a limited color palette, which emphasizes process and the act of painting itself. The figures are reclining in chairs, but it's the way Bacon uses paint that grabs you. Look at the texture! It's thick in some spots, thin and transparent in others. Like how he drags the brush across the canvas, blurring the lines between the figures and their surroundings. Is that blood running down the chair on the left, or just drips of paint? It's hard to tell, and that's what makes it so compelling. It reminds me a bit of de Kooning, how he would smear and scrape the paint, creating these visceral, emotional surfaces. Bacon isn't just painting a portrait; he's capturing the raw, messy reality of human existence. And he's not afraid to leave things open to interpretation, embracing ambiguity and multiple meanings over any one fixed idea.