GREGOIRE
JEANMONOD
Art and its stories as an inspiration
Francis Bacon
Study for Portrait on Floding Bed
1963
Act before thinking
Self-taught who came late to painting, the Irishman Francis Bacon became famous in the 1940s for his spectacular works in which bodies seem abused to the point of dehumanization, as if distorted under the effect of an indomitable energy. These striking images made him one of the main representatives of the London School, a movement claiming the practice of figurative painting at a time when modernity seemed to have to pass through abstraction.
If his works inevitably suggest violence and uneasiness, it is originally their creative process that exploited – in an assumed and even claimed way – the notion of accident. Indeed to start a canvas, instead of drawing or tracing a sketch, he projected paint on the blank surface to generate a spot with a random outline. It was from this hazardous form that his imagination could begin to work, bringing out of the chaos images whose spontaneous character still constitutes the power of his art today.
What we can take away:
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Any creative process comes up against the blank page syndrome ". By wanting to intellectually conceive very successful ideas, we prevent ourselves from concretizing them. Acting instinctively – even riskily – allows us to generate a working basis that we can then perfect.
