visited christ church cathedral early in the morning. got there before it was opened. So i sat on one of the benches around the green, feeling the warmth of the sun on my face, and listening to the church bells for thirty minutes.
beautiful tile work.
then, i took a half an hour stroll to dublin city gallery - hugh lane.
turns out it was the last day for a special retrospective exhibition on painter Francis Bacon! it was perfect because I just wrote a paper on one of his pieces, and I think he's one of the most intriguing painters ever!
hugh lane gallery. modest, but great, museum.
beautifully chaotic
room playing video about bacon.
bacon's piece on which i wrote my art history paper.
three figures at the base of a crucifixion. 1944.
here are some random facts about francis bacon. I didn't have a pen&paper with me, so i recorded these as 'notes' on my crap london phone. haha. these are the things that I found interesting enough to jot down.
- "deeply ordered chaos"
-"i attack the canvas with paint"
-"thank god i didn't go to art school."; bacon says he's not interested in the old techniques that art schools teach their students. he wants to create his own techniques.
- he insists that people try NOT to read his work. there is no story. he has none to tell. all about visual shock.
(all from melvyn bragg's interview w/ bacon)
- he rather violently destroys the canvas that he's unpleased with.
- i didn't know this but bacon paints on the unprimed, or 'wrong,' side of the canvas. he started doing this when he ran out of money and fresh canvases to paint on. but once he started painting on the coarse surface, he found that it instantly absorbs the paint and produces the texture he likes best.
- bacon likes to throw the paint on his canvas. and he says, "the first mark always has a vitality"
- he was close friends with american wildlife photographer Peter Beard, for he was interested in wild animals. in bacon's studio there were of Beard's photos of Kenya, and i thought the most powerful ones were of dead elephants. their shriveled skin enclose their once-large mass that has dissolved into nothing but a pile of bones.
- influenced by photographer eadweard muybridge, who in the late 1880s experimented with extremely fast shutter speeds to meticulously catalogue the movement of the human and animal body.
- close ties with portrait photographer john deakin.
- unlike other artists, bacon painted from photographs and not real life.
- fascinated by the body: 'corpus'
- moved by this image that captures the essence/power of the human scream.
film still from Eisenstein's 1925 film The Battleship Potemkim
- he admired silent films for their 'tremendous force and powerful closeups.'
the exhibit was fantastic, so I'm glad I got to peruse for two hours without feeling rushed.
ah! cute irish boys singing old pop, like "let's twist again"
before catching the bus to the airport, i sat on Trinity's campus just to calm myself down and rest in the sun.
so peaceful. the building in the photo is where I went to go see the Book of Kells and the Long Room.
all in all, it was a great, productive visit to dublin.
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