If you didn’t read this week’s post “The Glitter of the Mouth” I will read it to you, dramatically and enthusiastically, below. 👇
Reading commences as soon as you hit play. Enjoy!
Notes from the Captain
Art is bogus. Art is brilliant. Art… is whatever it is to you.
Francis Bacon (the artist, not the philosopher) did his thing. He had his obsessions, he had his style, and he was quite unapologetic about it. That is an odd thing to write because why would he apologize for it? He was making his art in the only way he knew how—from that heart of his that knew what it knew.
Did he only know pain? Did he only know bleakness? You be the judge.
All art is projection—of both the artist and the receiver.
So what if some folks were horrified by what they received? So what? Guess what? A lot of Francis Bacon’s art is horrifying. It is grotesque. It is…yuk. But it is what it is.
Expression.
The meat thing. That’s what catches most people. The brutality of it. The whiff of the butcher. Not me. For me, it’s the heads. The mouths. The screaming, open, horrified and silent mouths.
And I say that as someone whose first encounter with a Bacon painting—at the Met retrospective in NYC in 2009—included some very saucy meat-based dishes of his. The whole thing left me reeling in a room filled with people who were all wearing the same look on their faces.
That look said: “WTF? What the actual?”
[flashback]
“Let’s get out of here,” I’d said to my friend after we’d wandered past these paintings. Heading into the Bacon section had been almost an afterthought and it made me instantly uncomfortable. I can’t remember any particular painting—I think I kept looking away only to be confronted by another, more horrifying—I just remember the colors. The feel of the place. The dark. The sense of black blood. The slipperiness of it.
It was like I could smell it.
In my memory of that day, we’d just been in a room filled with a bunch of ancient statues and Michelangelo smoothness, wandering around, and now, here we were looking at… this? I didn’t know anything about Bacon at the time, but I knew this art made me sweat. I knew it reminded me of the farm1 and of animals and the cycle of life. I knew it was touching at ugliness.
But you know, in an artsy way.
Art, man. What a trip.
Art is reaction, and you can sit there all you want and say “I don’t know shit about art,” and you can be talking about me or you can be talking about yourself, it doesn’t matter.
What is there to know but your reaction to it?
How does it make you feel?
I think your reaction is one of the most honest microseconds of your life that you can have.
It is visceral.
It is MEATY.
It is all guts and disturbance of their workings.
Like or don’t like. Be completely unaffected by it and never think about it again. Are these the only three choices? Are there more? There is a scale, I think, and we all slide back and forth on that scale depending on mood and life circumstance. You can start out thinking someone’s art is not for you and twenty years later do a deep dive into their work and realize that your point of view has changed.
It might still not be for you, but your appreciation of what the artist was trying to achieve and your understanding of why, perhaps, will be altered. I had a surface view of Francis Bacon and his work, but after this week and making this video, I think I understand it a little more. I don’t understand him at all, but the work. We’re OK.
Do I like it now? I think the jury’s still out on that one, but if art exists to erupt a feeling in you then the feelings are flowing and consider me rocked by Francis.
It’s OK if he’s not for you. Not everything has to be.
You know. It’s art!
(Plus, he did inspire me to write something based on the imagery of ‘the glitter of the mouth’ which I interpreted my own way and in my own style and form.)
Art, baby!
May your paints and pens and bodies and minds and apertures and strings and all the flavors of your soul continue to turn up for your art this week.
Or, you know—love what you love, and I’ll see you out there, making stuff.
Your Captain, Janeen 🫡
Thangs from this episode…
👩✈️ Francis Bacon (the artist)
This excerpt from the David Sylvester interview with Francis Bacon contains the ‘glitter of the mouth’ quote that inspired Monday’s post. He also talks about mouths. And meat.
Now, if you’re interested in learning about Francis Bacon’s life and influences, I recommend you carve almost three hours our of your life to watch this. Confession: I still have an hour to go…
Some stuff I read:
In Defense of Artist, Francis Bacon - Eric Wayne
'Francis Bacon was my guy': Max Porter on his life-long obsession with the artist - The Guardian
Francis Bacon: The First Pope - Gagosian Quarterly
👩✈️ Claude Monet, President of the Sky Guy Club
Here’s a page with a bunch of sky pics - lovely for a quick scroll.
Now. Hay. Stacks.
And just an overview on Monet.
👩✈️ Glitter
In case you were wondering.
👩✈️ Battleship Potempkin
This silent film from 1925 is often cited as a very important film. The Odessa Steps scene with the baby in the carriage and the nurse’s face (which Bacon was inspired by - see above) has appeared in many things. Baby on the stairs! Baby on the stairs! (Or something on the stairs.)
This film is influential for many reasons. Let’s talk montage! Here. Watch this.
Battleship Potemkin - SF Silent Film Festival
You can watch the whole film on YouTube. Silent films have no language barrier!
👩✈️ Is burnt toast carcinogenic?
“Not very. Probably not very.”
Yeah, but what about bacon? Two Hanks in a row. What a bounty of science richness.
Thanks for listening/watching and sharing this week. If you want to chat about any of the concepts in this week’s post—or just in general—feel free to leave a comment for the Captain (it me.)
Do. Make. Be.
🫡
Shameless Podcast Plug
Listen to audio versions of early issues of The Stream on my podcast, Field of Streams, available on 👉 all major podcasting platforms 👈
Here’s Apple
Don’t read anything into that. I don’t need therapy. Well, not for that, anyway.
Share this post