Francis Bacon Francis Bacon Analysis

Art is a way for any artist to explore the depths of their own minds and display their own opinions on certain matters to the world. Artworks allow for the viewer's imagination and creativity to be sparked into finding a meaning and purpose and to question certain topics. This is exactly what artists Joan Ross and Francis Bacon manage to achieve in their debatable depictions of life. Francis Bacon an influential and controversial Irish painter, carved a new macabre way in which we see art today, by exploring what it meant to be human, the human condition and form, with intense emotional and application. His art often portrayed tortured subjects and nightmarish scenes. His powerful imagery showed his fascination and obsession with popes, and

He said that ‘people have been dying around me like flies and I’ve had nobody else to paint”, so he decided what better subject than himself. As Bacon felt like there was nobody else around him to support him or love him, his self portraits carry a raw sense of anxiety and alienation. They often have an intense sense of fear. The pieces also reflect how everyone felt after the incomprehensible atrocities of the Holocaust that came to light at the end of World War Two. However, his piece called “Self portrait with injured eye” painted in 1972 seems to focus on bacons aim to display and uncover the truth about love. The self portrait is inspired by the Bacons own awareness of his own mortality. The piece was created after Bacons lover Peter lacy who was a raging alcoholic, beat him up. The tortured flesh and slightly exaggerated bruised colour palette work together to expose the simple reality of the fragility of flesh. Bacon consistently explored the human limit, and wanted to show the world what human beings were when there was no fame and glam involved. Bacons use of the element ‘line’, in particular organic line, can be seen with the oval swelling of the eye and the curvature of the jawline.The use of this particular element simply can be seen to suggest brutality and the natural need for dominance in a relationship as organic lines help to symbolise and represent natural occurrences. The elements of colour and line have been applied to show abuse, violence, pain and cruelty. The stark black background creates an illusion of loneliness, isolation and the darkness that has been built up inside him after so long of being tormented, bullied and abused. As the shocking and sensitive portrait displays, organic curvature lines it causes the viewer to draw a realisation of how love can blind you, and in this