Tough I was thinking nobody would be able to work in any mess, I really changed my mind when I visited Francis Bacon’s Studio at Dublin City Gallery, Huge Lane. A painter’s studio has always been a fascinating place and Bacon’s studio wasn’t an exceptions.
It’s not an ordinary disorder that I saw there, but the actual way the artist was working with. The Dublin City Gallery has known how to relocated from the original studio “Reece Mews” in London since the 28th October in 2009.
What can you found in Bacon’s studio? A hundred of used paint tubes, jars of pigments, paintbrushes, cans, empty bottles, cans of spray paint, sponges….at least everything he found as a substitute. It’s a very new way in how we look through art. The studio itself, is an unique archive of 7.000 items. The project took over two years to be operational and no more than 14 days to reproduce the space, including the ceiling and all the materials put back in the studio. Most of the interesting materials are actually archived.
Francis Bacon was born on a 28th of October in 1909. His family’s first residence in Ireland was Cannycourt House near the Curragh, Co. Kildare. Bacon’s emerging homosexuality stained family’s relations, and he was expelled from the house in 1926 when he was 16. He knew art would be his vocation since he saw a Picasso drawing exhibition in Paris in 1927. He started drawing without any guidance since then. He had several studios in his life but he moved in Reece mews in 1961 and he stilled there until he died in 1992. It was here where he realised some of his most beautiful paintings counting from the XXeme c. When he died,, his heir John Edward, offered Reece Mews Studio to Dublin City Gallery, the city where he was born.
When you first walk in, you are in a white marbled space, surrounded by quotes from the artist about the Studio. The only way to perceive his way of thinking. You can also watch a 1985 interview being played on the wall, the best background sound ever. At the end of the room, people can have this incredible view over his creativity space through a long window.
Bacon worked in a very unusual way on his paintings, that is how we can have an exclusive look on his methods.
Francis Bacon- Picture Credit
Despite the mess, over 300 photographs, fragments and negatives by John Deakin were found in this Studio. Deakin was one of the most popular photographer of his generation by his directness vision and his work was linked with Bacon’s: he worked with photographs by manipulating, folding them. Then he was inspired by all these folds and manipulations, leading by personal feelings. His originality was about not doing like the others: what looks like rubbish to us looks like a material for him.
It was his leading machine where all his images were coming from. It was a very productive mess and he loved working that way: “This mess here around us is rather like my mind. It may be a good image of what goes on inside me, that’s what it’s like, my life is like that”. That’s the reason why they have great paintings in this exhibition, for saying, most of them are not well-known by the public.
This area is like you’re walking in the artist’s head, books, papers and photographs all over the floor…paints over the wall with incredible vivid colours, like the pink one. Better than a Egyptian tomb! The main purpose of this exhibition is to show how the materials and the ideas come together. It’s an insight into the artist’s creative process and working methods.
What it’s amazing when I’m looking back the Studio content, is that I have found very clear evidence from where Bacon’s idea came from. Most of all, the feelings I had in front of photographs and paintings. I feel his studio feel giving a real insight into Bacon’s world and mind.
The Dublin City Gallery allowed me my very own piece of Francis Bacon who was the most expensive living British artist in 1992. With him died the unifying mind, the place where everything came together, into what Bacon himself called, in a 1985 interview, “Images which are a concentration of reality, and a shorthand of sensations (The University Time)
Somehow a part of Francis Bacon has come home with me.
Curves of Emotions 