17 Jul 2014 | 1 Comments
Bacon’s Frank about Portraiture
Occasionally an artist's recorded thoughts give hints that their views on portraiture are not conventional. I have quite a collection of them. However someone just sent me this 1971 statement by Francis Bacon in which he completely rejects
21 May 2013
Plays on the Mind
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Richard Foreman, an experimental playwright for more than four decades "has presided over heady spectacles that mingle the conventions of theater with ... stroboscopic stage sets designed as embodim
09 Mar 2013
Proust’s and Degas’ Disappearing Models
Literature and its methods are a useful yardstick by which to judge our knowledge and understanding of the visual arts. For instance, the known fact accepted by literary critics that many friends and acquaintances of Marcel Proust, the great Fre
22 Jul 2012
Anthropomorphic Landscapes
Visual metamorphosis. It's my term to describe a compositional method long used by major artists but virtually unknown to the art world except in a few rare cases. The only major exceptions I can immediately think of are Martin Schöngau
31 May 2012
Francis Bacon on Portraits and Crosses
I’ve just been reading a series of essays on Francis Bacon and have come across two quotes that I must pass on. A young doctoral student had some long conversations with Bacon in 1975 in which Bacon was saying that when he looks at a great pai
12 May 2012
Chaos as the Source of Creativity
Chaos is the source of creativity. Chaos – some might say “controlled chaos” – increases the likelihood that two disparate ideas or forms will merge to create something new. That’s at least one theory of orginality.
14 Mar 2011
Bacon and Daumier
A recent entry on one of Daumier’s Don Quixote and Sancho Panza paintings showed that the knight’s lance and shield are really substitutes for the artist’s brush and palette. Even the other way round, when Daumier depicted an ar
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