Painting styles inspiration notes

Loose Ideas:
creating a figural landscape made out of multiple people’s bodies

the closest they are to each other, an effect is more prominent than if they are farther away

playing with the figurative representation of proximity

replacing what color is found within a pixel with it’s opposite, or some other result from an equation.

Inspirational works:
Francis Bacon
Gilles Deleuze’s words on his work
John Baldessari and Koen van der Broek

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I took notes and copied straight text from two main pieces I found online. The first is a David Sylvester article here. This one came to me from another class and I found it very fascinating and inspirational from a philosophical standpoint while still giving me keywords that I can translate into technical approaches. The second is a summary of several interviews of Francis Bacon, conducted by David Sylvester that you can read here.

Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in The Logic of Sensation, written by Daniel W. Smith

Deleuze’s analyses Bacon’s work “…from the simplest to the most complex.”
not what it means, but how it functions.

Deleuze treats Bacon’s work as a multiplicity and attempts to isolate and identify the components of that multiplicity.

Deleuze’s three simplest aspects of Bacon’s paintings:
- the Figure
- the surrounding fields of color
- the contour that separates the two

Modern art and modern philosophy can be said to have converged on a similar problem: both renounced the domain of representation and instead took the conditions of representation as their object.

Deleuze suggests that there are two general routes through which modern painting escaped the cliches of representation and attempted to attain a “sensation” directly: either by moving towards abstraction, or by moving toward what Lyotard has termed the figural.

An abstract art like that of Mondrian or Kandinsky, though it rejected classical figuration, in effect reduced sensation to a purely optical code that addressed itself primarily to the eye; by constrast, an abstract expressionism, like that Pollock, went beyond representation, not by painting abstract forms, but by dissolving all forms in a fluid and chaotic texture of manual line and colors.

The geographical world, the world recorded on maps, is perceptual and conceptual; it is an abstract system of coordinates with an unspecified perspective. A landscape, by contrast, is sensory; it is a perspectival world, enclosed by a horizon that moves as our body moves. In a landscape, we do not so much move in space as space moves with us.

But the lived body, says Deleuze, is still a “paltry thing in comparison with a more profound and almost unlivable Power,”

the power of rhythm in its confrontation with chaos. Sensation is itself constituted by the “vital power” of rhythm, and it is in rhythm that Deleuze locates the “logic of sensation” indicated in his subtitle, a logic that is neither cerebral nor rational.
the critique of pure reason – Kant

- aesthetic comprehension
- rhythm
- chaos
- force

under the heading of chaos…
Cézanne said that the painter must look beyond a landscape to its chaos: he spoke of the need to always paint at close range, to no longer see the wheat field, to be too close to it, to lose oneself in the landscape, without landmarks, to the point where one no longer sees forms or even matters, but only forces, densities, intensities.

Translated into Kantian terms, both Cézanne and Klee mark the movement by which one goes from the synthesis of perception (apprehension, reproduction, recognition) to aesthetic comprehension (rhythm) to the catastrophe (chaos), and back again: the painter passes through a catastrophe (the diagram) and in the process produces a form of a completely different nature (the Figure).

On the other hand, this use of color claims to bring out a peculiar kind of sense from sight: a haptic vision of color, as opposed to the optical vision of light. What Deleuze calls hapticvision is precisely this “sense” of colors. The tactile-optical space of representation presents a complex eye-hand relation: an ideal optical space that nonetheless maintains virtual referents to tactility (depth, contour, relief).

From this, two types of subordination can occur: a subordination of the hand to the eye inoptical space (Byzantine art), and a strict subordination of the eye to the hand in a manualspace (Gothic art).

Deleuze in turn suggests that a new Egypt rises up in Bacon’s work, this time composed uniquely of color and by color: the juxtaposition of pure tones arranged gradually on the flat surface produces a properly haptic space, and implies a properly haptic function of the eye (the planar character of the surface creates volumes only through the different colors that are arranged on it).

In this regard, Deleuze will place Bacon in the great tradition of Turner, Monet, Cézanne, and Van Gogh—the great modern colorists who replaced relations of value with relations of tonality.

As reference to blind people receiving sight after surgery:
They would acquire a perception of the world only after an often-painful process of learning and apprenticeship, during which they developed the schemata and “Gestalten” capable of providing this prereflective sense experience with the coordinates familiar to ordinary perception.

…such as found in infants… sensory world populated by pure intensities (of sound, light, hunger, etc.) in which the baby cannot yet distinguish between itself and its world.

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Interview with francis bacon, given by David Sylvester (Questions in bold)

“I’ve had a desire to to do forms”

“It was like one continuos accident mounting on top of another”

“… this transformation of the image in the course of working…”

he wants to paint specific things like portraits, but when you go closer to analyze them, the image is made up of contours and shape that have nothing to do with the image, you won’t know what you are looking at, because really it is a complete accident.

“For instance, the other day I painted a head of somebody, and what made the sockets of the eyes, the nose, the mouth were, when you analysed them, just forms which had nothing to do with eyes, nose or mouth; but the paint moving from one contour into another made a likeness of this person I was trying to paint.”

“Because this image is a kind of tightrope walk between what is called figurative painting and abstraction”

If people didn’t come and take them away from you, I take it, nothing would ever leave the studio; you’d go on till you’d destroyed them all.
Probably so.

But aren’t there other equally great portraits by Velasquez which you might have become obsessed by? Are you sure there’s nothing special for you in the fact of its being a Pope?
I think it’s the magnificent colour of it.

“So the images that I’m putting down on the canvas dictate the thing to me and it gradually builds up and comes along.”

he has this interest in things other than the subject, than the why, but how it is created instead. the aesthetic elements that configure the painting as the portrait that it is.
He was really interested in matters of form and color

Bacon has been heavily influenced by 1920’s picasso