Bacon is interested in the figure beyond figuration. It is a kind of form which acts directly on our nervous system. The sensation of the flesh, undistracted by thought.

It is the figure removed from the confines of specific narrative. No longer needed extensive labouring over or confined to more praggmatic end points. It has found a certain autonomy.  Itis something more direct, lacking the waffled monolgued. Its the recording of the fact, a true realism, and avoidance of the empty motif.

In this chapter movement is also touched upon. The link between Bacon and Muybridge is mentioned. The later is cited has provided a fertile base for Bacon to draw from in revelling new ‘decompositions’ of movement.

Rhythm is mentioned in regards to Bacon and movement. Figural dynamcis are certainly the most improtant aspect of Bacon’s figures. The squirm, the dissovle, they melt, they fall, the implode, they vomit themsleves out and get pulled in by some inner gravity, they are wiped over and split open. These acrobats are often scarred with blurtred scrubbings, ambiguous passagesof paint which denote a particular movement through space. They also convey more illustrative positionings of limbs, moments paused, figures held in a particular pose and denoting a movement stilled between A and B. It seems like a direct link back to Bacon’s fascination with photography, the slow vs fast shutter speed approach to capturing movement. In amoungst the choas, the lines, the paint and the space, Bacon seems to harness both. He does it without ignoring the principles of his own medium, but instead as a mode in which to follow deconstruct adn understand it. It becomes a dialogue adn battle between painterly organic marks and linear design. I think colour also plays a huge part.

muybridge- ‘the decomposition of movement into seperate parts’ intense and violent movements. the impact of invisable forces.

rhythm-s 

“For both Bacon and Kafka the spinal colum is nothing but a sword beneath the skin, slipped into the body of an innocent sleeper by an executioner” 

Deleuze describes the seperation in Bacon’s figures of bone and flesh. The subbordinate nature of the skeletal structure and flesh coating in reality and the drawn linear structure and painterly covering in art is challenged.

Bacon’s figures are not boneless, but the bones seem to become malleable and to lose total control ove rthe figural exterior. The flesh becomes primary and the hierachy is inverted. Is the product of an individual who sees both the spiritual improtance of flesh and who favours the fluid nature of paint over the rigid contorl of line.

The relaitonship is no longer one of a cage in which the flesh is controleded and trapped but a stage upon which the flesh can perform. Deleuze describes these ‘acrobatics’ perfectly.

 Some of the most pertinant examples of Bacon’s approach are seen in his dealing with heads. He ‘dismantles’ the face in order to rediscover the head. The rubbing and brushing provide visual interuptions, creating ambiuguous areas of ‘indiscernability’. The face is no longer a portrait of an individual but a vessel to describe something more universal about man in general. The figure always seem to keep some attachment to the specific of the sitters identity, to ensure empathy and pity. Yet they are shifted far enough beyond to become a metaphor of makind in general. Bacon manages to combine the emotive power of dealing with specific individuals and sesnations with the broad impact of a universal message. This is no emotionally detached intellectual allegory. It is far more direct, piercing through us and channeling into our nervous system.

Particular feature of the face take on importance for Bacon. There are what Deleuze calls ‘eyes without sockets’ which he connects back to Rembrandt. This structural loosness creates a floating hole of depth and uncertainty.  

Most distrubing, but accurate, is his description of the scream in Bacon. He talks about the mouth as a vessel through whihc the entire body, the mass of flesh, can pass. The lack of an audible scream is replaced by a visceral ingestion and excreation of self as flesh. There is a gravitational pull of the form through this hole, as if it is the central force through which the action and emotion takes place.

the mouth and its importance- no longer an organ, a hole through which the entire body escapes, sense of pressure and itnensity. and which the flesh descends.the pity of the scream, not audible, but visceral, a scream as a physcial ingestion and vomit at the same time.

I suppose this is, in a way, a follow up to your post the other day. More directly it is a response to an image I have just starting working on.

Many of my paintings sourcfe found imagery, staged photographic images and other photographic sources. Normally, however, the image is a fragment of a new synthetic construction. It is analysed and detached from cotnext and given a new location in a woder field.

So it is interesting when the odd image strikes me and inspires a failry direct translation from found image to final image. This was the case with an image I found two days ago of a young british 10m diver in the daily sports pages.

I knew almost straight away I wanted to use the whole iamge. Not to break it up, dissovle chunks or introduce it too a new set of surroundings.

 Initially I did two small drawings and then today I started working on a canvas, 40inch x30inch.

Fisrtly the enlarging of the image is going to give a new sense of heroism to the subject, but this is old, tired and obvious ground to go over.

What interests me is the chocies I deem necessary to make in the recreation of the image. No painter ever copies truthly, even if they want to. They are always forgetting, remering in a new way, fiddlings, shifting and moving the image towards a new altered end point.

Look at Manet’s work, in this instance his ‘Balcony’ painting of 1870. Look how geometric the coposition is, the rigid retangular nature (a direct descendant of David) in its organisation and linear composition. He reorganises what he saw(either in life or in a photographic image) sytemmatically giving it a new sense of order and structure. Its almost a form of purification.

I realised I was attempting to do something similar today, without even being consciously aware of it. Firstly I divided the canvas up, not as the orignal image was, but in a slightly altered structure. I made the height in which both the pool and the crowd sat in identical. Both were 15 inches high, making the two of them create a square (as the canvas is 3o inches wide). This then left 10inches, and a quarter of the height, for the space in which the diving board and diver would sit. Before I had even added in the specific infomration I had divided the space into a mathematical and balacned format, altering the less rigid structure of the photograph. It was intuative, which is what I find fascinating.

Its as if we have a conversation with the photograph and the blank canvas. On the one hand we are looking to fulfill the mimetic function of recapturing the image. On the other we are aware of the abstract formal qualities of the painted surface. We desire to have harmony, to have balance. Its as if the dialogue between painted space and photographic images ensures we are honest to both truths.

 Since then the crowd has been drawn in and the diving board and diver. I now have a layout which will allow me to find a certain amount of autonomy in surface and colouration. Alloowing me to shift away from the specifics of the origianl source to capture what it is I think I saw in the original image. A sense of dramatic tension, a odd interest in the activity as a spectacle, of the audience inside and outside the cnavas interracting. I don’t wan’t to say too much more about this as I want to try carry working on this image without too much preconceived baggage or agenda. Mydesire to paint it has seen me skip a few ofthe normal stages of construction. I have no idea at this point if this enriches or empoverishes the potential outcome.

Francesca Woodman

In my first year teaching no artist has been referenced or spoken about by students more than Francesca Woodman.  She is neither as famous or as in your face noticeable as many other artists, yet something about her draws numerous people to her work. 

Woodman died at the tragically young age of twenty two, having only produced 800 prints. It would be wrong to assume that her fame or interest in her work is the by product of her youthful passing. Of course, as with Cobain/Keats and many others, it adds and projects a certain amount of meaning onto the work. yet the exists an autonomous power to her images that makes the worth discussing.

Woodman’s photographs explore many of the tricks of the trade familiar to student photographers. Double exposure, slow shutter speeds and low lights.  Technically her images are perhaps no more sophisticated than many a young photographer. But how she harnesses these devices to create her images is what stands her out. 

She becomes an actress in empty and eeeire interiors. The architecture becomes a stage which she does not just play on but through. Moving around so that she dissolves and fades into the worn walls.  What remains of her presence in the final image is no more important than what has been lost. Image a figurative response to Whiteread’s work. 

Francesca Woodman’s images seem to be about a struggle or attempt to disappear, to fade away. The architecture is both what traps and what provides a vehchile for some kind of escape. Slippery transient moments are paused. Figures, which seem to be metaphors of wider conditions, seem to resonate with our inherant concerns with the human condition. Rather than her young death being a tragedy which we project onto the images; is it not a case that her images articulate a particular understanding and struggle with the tragic which lead her to suicide. Either way, they are deeply moving image which, in my tired state, I have not been able to deconstruct effectively. 

The absence of noise is different from silence.  It is a state of being where sound should be present but isn’t.  This is a predicament which painting can be the most effective of mediums at articulating, it was present for a short time in the formative years of cinema, when film was silent, but even then its effect was diluted through the moving image, it very rarely stayed long enough to haunt you.  Perhaps the exception is in Eisentsteins film The Battleship Potemkin (bare in mind i may have spelt this completely wrong) which so famously influenced Francis Bacons scream.  The potency is captured in images at times when our logic tells us there should be noise but there isn’t, the effect produced by the knowledge of something missing.

It is curious that at a stage in human development when we are offered everything at the flick of a switch, the greatest potential strength in painting is in its perceived weakness to not be able to offer us all we expect of a modern appliance. 

The first great exponent of the silent scream came before it was evident that anything was even missing.  So it is in this respect, no surprise at all, that Goya found his absence in the wake of the illness that left him profoundly deaf.  He was a very great painter already, but after the illness his work seemed to reach a new level of clarity and painful precision.  For a man whose sole purpose was that of communication, both to give and receive, the pain of this disability must have been keenly felt.

There is an architect working today, I can’t remember her name, who speaks of the importance in experienciality.  What she means by this is that throughout the history of humankind we have sought to control our immediate environment.  And now, we have finally come to a point in our evolution where we have reached a level of almost complete control.  We have central heating at home, so the temperature remains at a constant, we get into our cars and the same applies, get to work and the same again.  This need for control spreads further still, into our social world.  We are connected to people in ever more disparate ways.  We communicate via text or email, we make friends over the internet with people we never meet face to face.  We have TV’s and hi fi’s in every room of the house.  All in an effort to curb and control our occaisions of human contact.  Why?  Because other people remain unpredictable and spontaneous.  The problem that all this controllig of the environment leads to a numbness, a numbness which we desire because its safe, but what we actually need is something different.  We in fact gauge the extent of our existence through experiences.  Perhaps more and more these experiences are needing to be manufactured in the form of adrenalin pursuits or (in the case of the architect) in the architecture of our homes.  So for eg. in order to go to the shower or kitchen you may travel down a walkway which takes you outside for a moment, thus experiencing different environmental conditions.

How does this affect the role of painting?  Well, the absence inherent in painting makes the present more profoundly and keenly felt.  But in order to make use of this, the previously stated factors have to be understood.  Just because its a painting doesn’t mean it automatically succeds in imagining the silent scream.

Its strange how i think of this when my most recent paintings hav been the quietest i have made, but then by describing them as quiet it shows that during their production I had, for the first time, begun to meditate on the importance of noise within a painting, indeed, i think they are my most successfully controlled works in terms of volume, although that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re my best,  or any good at all for that matter.

By understanding that the absence of noise isn’t exactly related to sound in the traditional sense, but in a more abstract musicality (ok, i know the analogy of music when describing painting is one of the oldest cliches but its relevant here) we can begin to understand the success of Goya’s greatest works.  The figures after the on set of deafness take on a more characterised appearence.  in the louder pieces, like his madhouse paintings, the faces are often gurning contortions.  It’s as if bone has taken on secondary importance to the maleability of the flesh.  And those key instruments of silent communication, the eyes, like full moons, and the hands, take on a profound significance in the acting out of each particular scenario.  the mouths themselves become caves, which appear to be sucking in the voice.

However even in his quieter paintings the impact is no less profound of disturbing.  Take a look at Bandit stripping a woman and tell me you’ve seen a more disturbing image.  The success of all his works lies in the pitch-perfect balance of the figure-ground relationship.  The ground as a nothingness is the perfect platform on which to cast his performances.  Amplifying their voices.

As for Fracis Bacon, well, just read all of the above.  The 2 greatest exponents of the silent scream lie as unerringly close bedfellows in the structure and composition of their works.

I like Floater Tom.  I know i keep going on about it but i think that touch of realism really helps, it struck me today that it is kinda like your plynth in place of bacons circlular arena.  the realism anchors the image, which gives you the freedom to push certain abstract facets, whilst still retaining a sense of place; the subject doesn’t float off into a paint-about-paint scenario.  And this figurative element creates something which verges on narration but doesn’t quite go that far, it simply offers a lyricism to counteract the figure (and i use the word figure deliberately, in a deleuzien sense) impact.  Its striking me more now, that we need a lyricism within painting -bacon would turn in his grave- and even if we try to avoid it people still attach stories of actions to the image anyway.  Its a natural thing for humanity to do.  but then, most of the successful contemporary and modern painters don’t produce narrative paintings but instead, have a complex relationship to it, balancing finely over what is the precipice into illustration.  To utter his name again, Bacon did this better than most.

My only dislike of Floater is the oozing glaze and varnishing on the left, i still don’t think you’ve found the solution to that overly glossy, syrupy appearance that its so easy to suffer from.  it just looks a little sickly sweet for me.  i read on the back of a tin of household varnish, that for best results apply 3 0r 4 layers, and with all but the top layer, sand down with fine sandpaper.  although I haven’t tried it myself yet, what the sanding does is rough up the surface slightly so that light doesn’t reflect directly into your eye (rather like the odd surface of a stealth fighter jet dispersing the radar waves bouncing of it in order to appear smaller).  Again i’m not sure if this is suitable for you, I know that what you normally do is pour it on, and you wouldn’t be able to do this obviously, with what i’ve just suggested, but maybe its another option for you.  i’ve tried using matt and satin glazes and they just don’t seem to get the required effect.  Oh and whilst on the subject of effects, how do you get those clean even lines, like on the tiles and the swimmers legs, is it marker pen, if so, which particular pen have you found the best?

Whilst i like Floater, the blue lady is still my favourite, although water does appear to be a perfect vehicle for your abstract/figurative conversations, and it may be good, like you said, of having a little series looking into this.  Michael Andrews swimmer with daughter is brilliant at it.

Thinking here about your mini essay on post-modernism tom.  It strikes me that Robert Rauschenberg really is one of the truly significant post-modern practitioners, and that I need to read so much more on him.  Its bizarre, he put together collages of random objects, and stated that he didn’t look for any meaning in what he placed together, but that the viewer would find his own lyrical connections, how the hell is this good, how the hell is it art, but yet it is!!  its the true avant garde, precisely because its rough, uncompromising and relentlessly indefatiguable(?!?).

the need for a return to craft- craft as art/art as craft/craft in art.

  This is a potentially misleading opinion and you was right to immediately place the idea under scrutiny.  The great painter of the present will incorporate a range of techniques to produce his/her work, dipping into a wide range of contrasting subjects found in both high and low culture, juxtaposing these often in the same work.  Indeed, one of the catch phrases that can be most commonly applied to post-modernity is disharmony. How one object seems to not quite fit reasonably with another, causing a friction.  Of course these frictions have been played out since painting began, think of the simplified colour and form exercises in abstraction, look at earlier scene paintings and you will see the same abstract awareness of form and colour, then think of lyrical associations that contradict the overall aesthetic, Titians wonderful little dog in the flaying of Marsyas is a good example.  The art of making a painting balance is tricky enough, but the greatest artists have always seemed to add the tension of disharmony into the mix. So how is this Post-modern disharmony different?  To say it is self conscious (one of the most common descriptions for Post-modernism) would be wrong, this effect has always been consciously sought after.  Perhaps it is better to say it is more sought after.  The line with which painters in history dared not cross, which would in essence make the visual enjoyment of the picture disappear has been drastically moved, that is to say, it has always been moving, but with the advent particularly of Manet, Cezanne and then Cubism, along with the publics gradual acceptance and now love of these works, we are able to break our images apart even more than ever.  Because of this, a whole range of analogical meanings can be expressed more deliberately than ever before within the breaking apart of a pictures harmony.

I am digressing, so I’ll return to the original point of craft in work.  It is a dangerous point to make because it can become easily misconstrued that craft can be art, and it becomes even more dangerous when we take into context the post-modern/duchampian idea that anything can be art.  So how do we make a defined, reasoned explanation that craft is not art?  Just in the same way that not all painting can automatically be called art just because it is a painting;  I suppose it comes down to the nature of why the work was produced -it has to be socially and artistically self-aware- is the outcome at once present and eternal?  The difficulty is that, when producing a painting, to be too ‘aware’ is to place the idea before the deed, and this outcome can only produce bad painting.  There is no easy answer, but an artists day-to-day concerns must feel present within the work.  This means that a painting of some nice mountains in Wales does not constitute Art although it may be a very nice painting, but if the paint is handled in some particular way or an object is placed in the landscape which results in a cutting lyricism then the image may indeed be Art.

 So, I move onto the Peter Doig show that is currently on in London (until end of April 2008) and the issue of craft and art raises its ugly head again.  There is no doubt in my mind that the show I witnessed was produced by a supreme master of the medium in question.  He really knows paint.  And equally there were some singular works which stand out as being profoundly emotive pieces, so why, on the whole, did I leave feeling slightly cold?  The answer is a fairly simple one, his oeuvre is just a bit too easy, I didn’t feel like I came out of the show having seriously questioned anything about myself or the world, I didn’t feel different at all.  And this harks back to the fact that his paintings give you what you want, there isn’t enough tension within them.  There’s visual tension, of the formal variety, but there was no tension in the subject, and if you’re gonna produce figurative works, you’ve got to include both in order to be seen as a great artist.  It is common place to advertise the outsider-ness of an artist, and Doigs retrospective certainly didn’t disappoint, there has been reams of writing on how he bucked the trend of the yBa’s, producing painting when there was no excitement surrounding it, the fact of the matter is, people never stopped painting, they just didn’t get famous for doing it.  Living in Trinidad, a true outsider, his works speak directly of this.  The single figure in splendid isolation.  They’d become almost like a sad cliche if it wasn’t for his painterly excellence, of which he really does excel at.

Francis Bacon “Portrait of Lucian Freud” 1965

“The entire series of spasms in Bacon is of this type: scenes of love, of vomitin and excreting, in which the body attempts to escape from itself through one of its organs to rejoin the field of the material structure…and the scream, Bacon’s scream, is the operation through which the entire body escapes through the mouth”

What Deleuze is talking about, I think, is the finding of the figure rather than the figurative. Its about finding the essence of his protagonists physicality, not its appearance. Its an excavation of the aesthetic which evokes rather than describes. The physical sensation visualised not the from mirrored. I suppose there is a link here to the more psychological peeling back of the skin performed by Bacon’s contemporary, Lucian Freud.

Deleuze goes on to say: “The heads are all prepared to receive these deformations (hence the wiped, scrubbed, or rubbed out zones in the portraits of heads)”

Its as if Bacon’s consciously abstract and shifts his visual in order to refind a pure form. Its that constant search for the reinvention of realism.

Deleuze expresses those elements of Bacon which I knew but could not articulate and then of adding in layers of interpretation which had previously been closed to me.

In chapter one of his seminal text he accurately asserts how Bacon composes the painting as ‘a kind of amphitheatre os place’. A stage which is used to to ‘isolate the figure’.

He goes on to talk about Bacon’s search for something beyond illustration and narration. Beyond the showing of what is seen or the telling of a story. Bacon searches for something uniquely painterly in his figuration, rather than competing with phtoography or literature. It is his isolation of the figure which Deleuze recognises Bacon’s ability to find this seperation of image from these two explicit functions. No longer merely a part of the whole but an object in its own right which we have to engage with directly. Deleuze articulates this perfectly, and then some.

‘Narration is the correlate of illustration. A story always slips into, or tends to slip into, the space between two figures in order to animate the illustrated whole. Isolation is thus the simplest means, necessary but not sufficient, to break with representation, to disrupt narration, to escape illustration, to liberate the Figure: to stick to the fact’

In my head an analogy seems to come to mind with music. This is no longer the note or the actor which is merely there to serve the composition or the script. This is the note nad actor on its own, paused and extended into a monologue of intense experience for the viewer.

Storyless we are left to deal with the thing in itself. It is an intensity and a focus which is capable of peeling back our skin and tapping directly into our system. It is painting on its own terms without the need for pure abstraction.

Bacon’s 1952 ‘Study of a dog’ is a work which does all of the above. Here Bacon readdresses a recurring specific motif in his work. The dog sits within a staged space. Twisting within itself with no other figures for its actions to relate too. It heroically spins and shakes in front of the small street scene in the backgroun. Seperated by the broad red stage it forces attention to remain on its form. The dark green cricle in which is performs seems to see it reach within itself.

Its disturbing and restless. It gives us no break, no justification, no point of departure. We are kept at this viscious moment without release untill our greedy eyes seek a pause outside the canvas. It leaps beyond the limits of dry, formal or narrative analysis. It penetrates to a place deeper, more human and more disturbing.

this is taken from Gilles Deleuze Logic of Sensation

Bacon has always tried to eliminate the sensational, that is, the primary figuration of that which provokes a violent sensation.  This is the meaning of the formula “I wanted to paint the scream more than the horror”.  When he paints the screaming pope there is nothing that might cause horror, and the curtain in front of the pope is not only a way of isolating him, of shielding him from view, it is rather the way in which the pope himself see’s nothing, and screams before the invisible.  Thus neutralized, the horror is multiplied because it is inferred from the scream and not the reverse.

I think this is an interesting point because of its impact on narrative.  essentially Bacon opposes narrative because it represents a veil which lies inbetween the viewer and a direct sensation upon the nervous system.  I think he’s correct insofar as his works are incredibly immediate, and there appears to be no way around this issue, so the decision for the contemporary artist is whether they want to tread bacon’s path, or sacrifice some of that gutteral impact for more specified information.

At one point [david] sylvester suggests “since you talk about recording different levels of feeling in one image…. you may be expressing at one and the same time a love of the person and a hostility towards them… both a caress and an assault?” to which bacon responds, “that is too logical.  i don’t think thats the way things work. I think it goes to a deeper thing: how do i feel i can make this image more immediately real to myself?  Thats all.”

This to me represents a strength of Bacon, to know what is required for a painting and specifically for a painting.  it is a particular danger for the visual artist to fall into the trap of listening to that side of them which attempts to form understanding into words. this has become particularly prevalent through the growth in influence of post-structuralist theory, which at its conception is a linguistic crtique.