Tuesday 22 September 2009

Marshall Arisman on Francis Bacon

"...Bacon was a major influence on me. In the late Sixties, figurative art-- the fine arts, particularly-- was dominated with no emotion. If you think about Andy Warhol's silkscreens of Elizabeth Taylor, there were figurative elements floating around, but they were not intentionally emotional. Bacon was one of the few painters that was living that I could find who was purely emotional to me. I didn't care what they were about. I could feel them, so I kind read them through my stomach instead of my eyes. And like any influence, if you look at anything it's got to influence you. And when you do that, you are aware. Everyone is aware. That influence is showing up, and then you've just got to live with the idea that I am not Francis Bacon. We've lived different lives, so I've got to believe that influence will be a composite of all of it. But it's hard, particularly in the illustration world, because people want to categorize."
- Marshall Arisman (read the rest here)

"In 1968, I saw my first Francis Bacon exhibition at the Gugenheim Museum. Starting at the top, wandering down the spiral walkway, I could feel those paintings enter my body through my nerve endings. When I reached the main floor I understood that contemporary paintings are an experience of emotions that enter the spectator on more than one level. Like a writer telling more than one story at a time, Bacon confirmed my belief that figuration does not have to be one story, one narrative."
- Marshall Arisman (read the rest here)




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