Painting 1985

Francis Bacon made this painting with oil, probably on canvas, and it looks like he attacked it! The color scheme is stark—blues and grays—offset by that blob of mustard yellow. I can imagine him, the canvas propped up, smearing the paint, wiping it away, only to re-attack it. This artist must have been struggling. I wonder if it was a bad day, or if this was how he approached every canvas, searching for something that always seemed just out of reach. I see a figure trapped in a box, or a cage. The paint handling is thin, almost translucent in places, and then thick, like the white impasto in the lower-right corner, like raw flesh. This makes me think of other artists, like Picasso, who also bent figuration. Painting has always been an embodied conversation between artists across time. We borrow, steal, and transform each other’s ideas, so that new ways of seeing and feeling emerge.