Appropriate to say, my knowledge on Bacon consisted entirely of my experience with that painting and some sketchy recall from Modern and Contemporary Art History. I had though I liked him, people who I knew I liked liked him,† but sometimes I need to research my own opinions before I know if they're any good. So pow, Francis Bacon on Wikipedia.
Honestly, I didn't like his work as much as I thought I was going to. I remembered Figure for being dark and desperate and squalid. Some of his work is like that, but in monotonously presented ways. The way he uses his vocabulary of symbols seems incomplete, notes missing from chords, and while his work is intuitive, it often seems too intuitive, sloshing over into naivety. The nature of his symbols and his reasons for using them are something I can identify with, and in researching him, I found a validation for a basis of inspiration that I'd often felt self-conscious about.
I draw inspiration from images in the movie The Ring. I've felt self-conscious because I was drawing inspiration from a piece of popular culture. My anxiety about that is how fixed in time images like that can be, and how it can carry those properties into the works that use them. I was afraid that people would see what I was doing, and whatever message I was tried to convey would be subsumed by my inadvertent namecheck of a middling contemporary horror movie and the sensational aspects of it.
However, one of the things I learned in my cursory research on Bacon was the partial inspiration for his 'scream' motif; among a short litany of inspirations, a certain scene from the 1925 movie Battleship Potemkin. Bacon apparently kept a particular still from the movie in his studio, a picture of a screaming nurse with blood on her face.
This is something I immediately identified with. What I felt bordered on relief at this demonstration that art could exist divorced from the intellectual content of its inspirations. It would be a hard sell to make the case of Bacon's paintings as soviet propaganda as Battleship Potempkin was. He witnessed a peripheral notion from that work and it spoke to something in him, giving voice to the unspeakable. He saw on accident the shape of something he had only felt before. This is what I felt when I saw The Ring. Those horses looked like a feeling I've had and never had a word for.
In the woods of New Hampshire, you can wander off the path for just a few feet, and suddenly you're in a place that might never have seen a human being, forest so timeless and remote that you feel lost, and that you could be lost forever. Then sometimes you see the ruins of a stone wall, or the foundations of a house buried in a hundred years of overgrowth. It's an eerie feeling when your realize this lonely, desolate place was someone's home once. You realize that even when you're lost in the woods, you're still in footprints of those who came before, and long departed; alien, yet familiar on a fundamental human level that is comforting in the wilderness. I feel that way about Francis Bacon sometimes.
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*In a previous post, I briefly talked about The Ring's portrayal of horses. For the purpose of illustrating what I was talking about in the post, I grabbed an image that was an example meant, one of the first images that came up in the search. Once I stated writing about it, I began to realize how profound the imagery affected the effects I try to achieve in my work. Below is a comparison of the horse image, and an eye I painted without reference far in advance of even having a reason to find the horse image. I almost laughed when I saw how similar they are.
†One of my favorite quotes to take out of context is from H.R. Giger, describing the how Bacon's screaming mouths inspired the design of the Xenomorph from the Alien movies: “It's pure Bacon.”
I remember seeing "Figure with Meat" at the Art Institute as a child and thinking that the figure in the painting looked like a "happy meat angel." Seeing it again, I'm not inclined to change my opinion.
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