Marching Band

You remember that steak we ate just now? Well, that's how it is. We live off one another. The shadow of dead meat is cast as soon as we are born.

- Francis Bacon in conversation with Michael Peppiatt

I've had this photo for a while, sitting in the album I keep of anonymous photographs - a marching band in full swing, its very dark and no one has any visible features other than their feet and the instruments which cover their faces. I often look at it and wonder how I might use it, and there is something in the shadows cast which spoke to me today - this might even turn into a painting, I've not decided quite yet.

Bacon and his incunabula

Every movement of the brush on the canvas alters the shape and implications of the image. That is why real painting is a mysterious and continuous struggle with chance - mysterious because the very substance of the paint, when used in this way, can make such a direct assault upon the nervous system; continuous because the medium is so fluid and subtle that every change that is made loses what is already there in the hope of making a fresh gain.

The quote you see above originates from a 1953 interview with Francis Bacon, which has more recently surfaced in a book entitled Incunabula. The volume serves as a sort of visual record of Bacon's working practice, and his source images which were most influential to him. It's most enlightening for those of you who may be familiar with his work, simply because covers everything from wartime photos, to newspaper clippings, with instances of his own personal photography as well as personal sketches. 

The sketch in the photo is from my own personal journal, and depicts a painting which Bacon executed in 1982 - Study of the Human Body.