"This day's experience, set in order, none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, set aside." –Alice Munro, "What is Remembered"
Want a Bacon at your bus stop? Well not long to wait now…
From 8 August Art Everywhere will greet you good morning on your way to work, bump into you on the way home from the pub and make waiting for a car parking space at the supermarket a more enlightening experience.
Here’s what Bacon’s Head VI would look like if it makes the final list. Remember, its not too late to get involved:
And yesterday I tweeted the following response, which has been ignored by… uhm, well… everyone… so far as I can tell:
Frankly, I am beginning to wonder if anyone on Twitter ever reads any tweets that are not directed @them. I am following 83 feeds at the moment, and making the effort to read/skim everyone’s tweets, and it’s all I can do to keep up. For anyone who follows a couple of hundred (or more), it must be impossible! Or a full-time job…
But then again, maybe they just didn’t get the joke/reference?
How about you? Do you get it?
Anyone?
Keywords: Ragged Claws Network @RaggedClawsNet: “Francis Bacon’s Head VI makes the bus stop look like a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.”
So why van Gogh? In the 1985 episode of The South Bank Show that featured Francis Bacon, host Melvyn Bragg showed a slide of van Gogh’s painting, The Night Cafe, to Bacon and read van Gogh’s description of it out loud:
BRAGG [referring to the slide]: That was a painting that van Gogh did, and he said about it, “I have tried to express the idea that the cafe is a place where one can ruin oneself, run mad, or commit a crime.” He also said, although he was very, very fond of the painting, he said, “It’s one of the ugliest paintings I’ve done.”
BACON: Well, I don’t think it’s ugly at all, I think it’s an extremely beautiful painting. Of course, I don’t understand what he’s saying about a cafe, that people are ruining themselves by drinking, so if they want to drink themselves [sic], why shouldn’t they? [bold added] And I just think one of the great inventions of it, for me, at least, is the way he has done the lights. He’s made those, he’s made the light turn around those bulbs, and that in a way adds enormously to the [indecipherable], without that, that painting wouldn’t have the same extraordinary inten-, extraordinary intensity.
Bacon’s defence of cafes and drinking will come as no surprise to anyone who knows anything about the artist, but it is amusing that it occurs in a documentary that is infamous for certain scenes in which it is quite obvious that both Bragg and Bacon have had quite a lot to drink.
You can read Melvyn Bragg’s recollection of the circumstances surrounding his interview with Bacon right here.
Ragged Claws Network 
Vincent van Gogh
LikeLike
Thank you, Mark! Yes, van Gogh.
So why van Gogh? In the 1985 episode of The South Bank Show that featured Francis Bacon, host Melvyn Bragg showed a slide of van Gogh’s painting, The Night Cafe, to Bacon and read van Gogh’s description of it out loud:
Bacon’s defence of cafes and drinking will come as no surprise to anyone who knows anything about the artist, but it is amusing that it occurs in a documentary that is infamous for certain scenes in which it is quite obvious that both Bragg and Bacon have had quite a lot to drink.
You can read Melvyn Bragg’s recollection of the circumstances surrounding his interview with Bacon right here.
LikeLike