I recently watched one of my favorite art films, Love is the Devil. starring Derek Jacobi as Francis Bacon and a very young Daniel Craig as his lover George Dyer.
The film is an intense meditation on the creative impulse as an expression of the libido. While you won't see any of Bacon's paintings in the movie, the director filmed it with much distortion and strange lighting, evoking Bacon's artistic style and nihilistic frame of mind.
For our latest model, Christophe, I attempted something Bacon-esque, i.e. an abstracted head study against a dark background. I did the painting in one three hour session beginning with a drawing using acrylic on linen:
Then the application of color and, for lack of a better adjective, "angry" brushstrokes:
Here's the final image:
It was weird trying to channel Bacon. I became quite unnerved in the process but I think this was worth the exercise. I lost the drawing a bit, due to distortion, but still consider it a portrait since Bacon's portraits of Dyer weren't meant to be realistic or conventionally recognizable.
Maybe I'll try to imitate Lucian Freud next week.
