Francis Bacon
Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953
Painting, 1946 @ The Estate of Francis Bacon
An artist that always interested the darkest corners of my mind is Francis Bacon.
He's not a just a photographer but I believe his work invokes some sort of emotions that people who like to play/ photograph on these emotions could relate to. Bacon never painted from life, he always worked from photographs. Also he often painted variations of the same subject and sometimes revisited certain subjects many years later.
Which a lot of photographers do. I know I do a lot. I will revisit the same parks, events, or place I love and photograph it over and over. The results are always different. You see things the second time around differently then you did before. Especially after sharing you work with people or your class and receiving constructive criticism. Make you see things in a different light. Which I believe a lot of his works makes you do that.
His early work (1929-1944) was influenced by Surrealism but did not gain much critical success and in 1928 he decided to become an artist after seeing an exhibition of Picasso’s work in Paris. Unfortunately he died in 1992 from a heart attack.
After the presentation to the class I realized my ideas and interests are still very all over the place. Narrowing an idea I have down to just one thing and exploring every aspect of it is still proving a little more difficult. Glad to hear some new terms in correction to what I thought some of my work/ideas might have been. Example like tableau and not conceptual. Also that you work for yourself and not your teacher. Just nice things I need to keep reminding myself of and not let my fears take over.
I looked at Bacon's main web page (http://www.http://francis-bacon.com/) and was really interested to see how his art developed over the 70-ish years of his career. He clearly kept his fascination with the human figure, but experimented a lot with how he realized that fascination. I am like you - I do this a lot, too, revisiting the same places and/or themes and trying to find new ways to express them with my photographs. I won't get 70 years to practice, but I'll make the most of what I get :)
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