domingo, 14 de dezembro de 2008
Interviews (4)
David Sylvester - Actually, your scale is very consistent. Almost everything you paint is pretty well to the same scale. Your smaller paintings are of heads and, when you paint a large painting, it's of a full-length figure: the head in the large painting is the same size as the head in the small one. There are very few cases of a whole figure done in a small painting.
Francis Bacon - Well, that's my drawback, that's my rigidness.
DS - And the scale is near that of life. So that, when you do a figure, the picture is large, which displeases the collectors.
FB - Yes, but my pictures are not very large compared to so many modern paintings nowadays.
DS - But they seemed to be so ten years ago when everybody was asking you to paint small pictures.
FB - Not any longer. They look rather small pictures now.
DS - You paint a lot in series, of course.
FB - I do. Partly because I see every image all the time in a shifting way and almost in shifting sequences. So that one can take it from more or less what is called ordinary figuration to a very, very far point.
DS - When you're doing a series, do you paint them one after the other or do you work on them concurrently?
FB - I do them one after the other. One suggests the other.
DS - And does a series remain a series for you after you've finished working on it? That's to say, would you like the pictures to be kept together, or is it all the same to you if they get separated?
FB - Ideally, I'd like to paint rooms of pictures with different subject-matter but treated serially. I see rooms full of paintings; they just fall in like slides. I can daydream all day long and see rooms full of paintings. But whether I ever make them really like what drops into my mind, I don't know, because, of course, they fade away. Of course, what in a curious way one's always hoping to do is to paint the one picture which will annihilate all the other ones, to concentrate everything into one painting. But actually in the series one picture reflects on the other continuously and sometimes they're better in series than they are separately because, unfortunately, I've never yet been able to make the one image that sums up all the others. So one image against the other seems to be able to say the thing more.
David Sylvester in Interviews with Francis Bacon, 1975.
Francis Bacon - Well, that's my drawback, that's my rigidness.
DS - And the scale is near that of life. So that, when you do a figure, the picture is large, which displeases the collectors.
FB - Yes, but my pictures are not very large compared to so many modern paintings nowadays.
DS - But they seemed to be so ten years ago when everybody was asking you to paint small pictures.
FB - Not any longer. They look rather small pictures now.
DS - You paint a lot in series, of course.
FB - I do. Partly because I see every image all the time in a shifting way and almost in shifting sequences. So that one can take it from more or less what is called ordinary figuration to a very, very far point.
DS - When you're doing a series, do you paint them one after the other or do you work on them concurrently?
FB - I do them one after the other. One suggests the other.
DS - And does a series remain a series for you after you've finished working on it? That's to say, would you like the pictures to be kept together, or is it all the same to you if they get separated?
FB - Ideally, I'd like to paint rooms of pictures with different subject-matter but treated serially. I see rooms full of paintings; they just fall in like slides. I can daydream all day long and see rooms full of paintings. But whether I ever make them really like what drops into my mind, I don't know, because, of course, they fade away. Of course, what in a curious way one's always hoping to do is to paint the one picture which will annihilate all the other ones, to concentrate everything into one painting. But actually in the series one picture reflects on the other continuously and sometimes they're better in series than they are separately because, unfortunately, I've never yet been able to make the one image that sums up all the others. So one image against the other seems to be able to say the thing more.
David Sylvester in Interviews with Francis Bacon, 1975.
