Francis Bacon, Study for Chimpanzee, 1957
From the Guggenheim:
Although Francis Bacon is best known for his alienated and often hideously distorted human figures, animals are the subject of at least a dozen of his canvases. He rarely worked from nature, preferring photographs, and for images of animals he often consulted Eadweard Muybridge’s Animals in Motion (1899), Marius Maxwell’s Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa (1925), and pictures from zoological parks. Intrigued by the disconcerting affinities between simians and human beings, he first compared them in 1949 in Head IV (Man with a Monkey), in which a man’s averted face is concealed by that of the monkey he holds.
Like his human subjects, Bacon’s animals are shown in formal portraits or candid snapshots in which they are passive, shrieking, or twisted in physical contortions. The chimpanzee in the Peggy Guggenheim work is depicted with relative benevolence, though the blurring of the image, reflecting Bacon’s interest in frozen motion and the effects of photography and film, makes it difficult to interpret the pose or expression. In composition and treatment it is close to paintings of simians executed in the 1950s by Graham Sutherland, with whom Bacon became friendly in 1946. The faint, schematic framing enabled Bacon to “see” the subject better, while the monochrome background provides a starkly contrasting field that helps to define form.
“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.” — Alan Watts
(via montanawildhack)
The Exclamation Comma. “Just because you’re excited about something doesn’t mean you have to end the sentence.”
That’s true.
