Francis Bacon 1998

Gary Hume made this Francis Bacon portrait with silkscreen print in mind, using flat areas of colour. Imagine Hume going back and forth, making decisions about tone, like deciding what colour to make Bacon's face, then just plonking it on there, as if the face is a big plate. What kind of blue? A kind of baby blue. It looks straightforward but I imagine that these things take a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. And the yellow, yellow for the whites of the eyes. Isn’t that strange? There’s something very blunt about it that, to me, relates to Alex Katz. Hume is in a gang with Katz, Elizabeth Peyton, and maybe even Fairfield Porter. There is a lineage going on there, but don't ask me to define it! All of these artists feed off each other and make surprising image choices. That’s what art is all about!