Study for a Portrait (looking right) 1962

Francis Bacon made this Study for a Portrait, we don’t know exactly when, using oil paint. Bacon’s marks are pretty loaded, huh? The paint is applied in such a way that you can really see the hand of the artist at work, like he’s pushing and pulling at the very flesh of the subject. Look at how the colours bleed and smudge together, blurring the lines between representation and abstraction, the real and the imagined. There’s this real physicality to the medium – the way the paint sits on the surface, thick in some places, thin and translucent in others. You can almost feel the weight of the brushstrokes, the pressure he applied to the canvas. Look at the line of red that defines the cheek. This feels significant, as if it were applied very deliberately. In a way, the rawness of the paint mirrors the rawness of human existence that Bacon was always trying to capture. The early influence of Picasso on Bacon is very clear to me, but Bacon brings a visceral, almost violent edge to portraiture that’s all his own.