The 'Macabre'...Francis Bacon, Picasso's Guernica...

The work of Francis Bacon initially 'confronted' me for want of a better word. Various aspects of his personal life, I personally found 'unsavoury', and as such I never really took the time to examine any of his work closely. "Bit 'dark' for my liking", was one eloquent appraisal much earlier in this blog I recall.

I should have learned from Costa and Marzano and the Habits of Mind that uninformed judgement narrows one's perspectives but there you go...I like my 'Art' with milk and 2 sugars thank you and don't want to try it any other way!

Well, thats changing. I still don't think Bacon is any genius or anything, but I do think Picasso is, especially after I examined his Guernica. The similarity however is the way both artist's work lodged away in a recess of the mind and although I found one confrontingly distasteful and the other macabrely  intriguing, they both nevertheless lodged in the psyche.

Then this week I got to congratulate a close friend's daughter on her graduation from QUT's Performing Arts and asked her what she knew about visual art. Her "not much, I'm an actress who likes to draw occasionally" turned out to be about 5 times my knowledge bank but she did show me a sample of her drawing...which in turn, invoked memories of Bacon and Picasso and caused me to take another look....

Picasso's Guernica

Francis Bacon

Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X

I may not be exactly sure where these macabre influences are taking me just yet but I do have the feeling they will somehow manifest in my final work...