When I am feeling energetic I walk past the former house of Daniel Farson – this was the venue for many debauched parties, with the ‘beautiful people’ of Soho coming down to North Devon on a cheap away day train ticket. Failed suicides (read the book very funny) and partner swapping.

The paintings of Francis Bacon have always stood out in the crowded museums and galleries that are stuffed full of mediocre British paintings.

Daniel Farson gives a personal view of his (if only in his own mind) ‘friend’s’ chaotic debauched life, gay lovers, masochistic beatings and ‘bits of rough’. This is in no way a proper critical view of this painter’s life, is is merely a tabloid’s view, scandalous, shallow and sometimes pathetic. It is a fantastic read!

The storytelling is random and underscored with Farson’s  deep bitterness – I think he wanted to be a bigger player in this game.

Bacon’s early life, which sounds positively hideous, the days in Berlin, Paris and the buggering about on the coast. The deep depression and the sex driven, drink driven highs are all in The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon. Well worth reading.

From the mid 1960s, Bacon mainly produced portrait heads of friends. He often said in interviews that he saw images “in series”, and his artistic output often saw him focus on single themes for sustained periods including his crucifixion, Papal heads, and later single and triptych heads series. He began by painting variations on the Crucifixion and later focused on half human-half grotesque heads, best exemplified by the 1949 “Heads in a Room” series. Following the 1971 suicide of his lover George Dyer, Bacon’s art became more personal, inward looking and preoccupied with themes and motifs of death. The climax of this late period came with his 1982 “Study for Self-Portrait”, and his late masterpiece Study for a Self Portrait -Triptych, 1985-86. Despite his seemingly existentialist outlook on life, Bacon appeared to be a bon vivant, spending much of his middle and later life eating, drinking and gambling in London’s Soho with Lucian Freud, John Deakin, Daniel Farson, Patrick Swift,[2] Jeffrey Bernard, Muriel Belcher and Henrietta Moraes, among others. Following Dyer’s death he distanced himself from this circle and became less involved with rough trade to settle in a platonic relationship with his eventual heir, John Edwards.

Monday 16^th May 1977

“Just off the quay somebody has drawn a maze in the sand, it looks rather good. It is a nice idea to draw something that will only last for a few hours, to be reclaimed again by the sea; maybe I’ll have a go. The time factor is interesting.”

Tuesday 17^th May 1977

“which will show me I can work from the landscape. This is something that I have felt is too over powering, too difficult for me to undertake but even after today I’m picking up little tricks. Tricks are I’m sure what landscape painting is all about.”

Click on image for old paintings for sale (?)

The constant questioning and declassification of what art is and what the content is has lead to this so called crisis in painting (there as always been a crisis in painting) – Painting is dead – the exponents of Conceptual Art tried to destroy the art object but failed – thought and the idea is the object. The primary aims of Conceptual Art in the 1960’s was to carry out a theoretical examination of ‘art’ and through understanding propose ‘concepts as art’.

In all cases the created image lies about its representation. A representation/illusion takes on more realness than the actual physical object, the object then becomes a metaphor for the created illusion. This in turn creates an additional reference for the object, an extra visual adjective eg. ‘The sky was very Turneresque.’ Turner’s illusion becomes a metaphor for the real thing, which vividly describes [in words] the actual sky. The concrete object cannot say everything about itself – it has a limited vocabulary and is unable to say what is required of it, it is on many levels mute. Read more...

Oil paint on canvas

…the experience of the landscape viewed in shorthand, the trick is to imply with the minimum of effort…

Unfortunately the majority of landscape art fails miserably however, ‘Lake Lucerne: the Bay of Uri from above Brunnen‘ circa 1844 (by Turner) is the ultimate painting of landscape and nature – it tells a massive story with very little content. This has been an important painting for me since the early 1970’s. I have always admired the New York Abstract Expressionists of the mid 20th century but when I first saw this painting by Turner…… my sock were blown off. It is without doubt a clever (maybe unfinished) conceptual landscape painting. Read more…

More images

Painting for Broomhill exhibition, 55″ x 55″ oil on canvas

‘Walk Away or Jump’

The image of the man holding the fish was taken in Cuba in 1999. We were staying in a beach complex. The canteen that feed us all ran out of food. A handful of us hired a boat to try and catch some fish. The red snapper in the photograph was caught by me and was quickly converted into a meal. Ironically I am highly allergic to fish and could therefore not eat it.

This painting was inspired by a cliff walk with one of Robert Rauschenberg’s assistants in 1978. The implications of this encounter still roll around in my brain. ‘Walk Away or Jump’. This was possibly one of the major turning points in my life – what did I turn down? Fame, fortune? See more…

Painting for Broomhill exhibition, 55″ x 55″ oil on canvas

‘Walk Away or Jump’

Inspired by a cliff walk with one of Robert Rauschenberg’s assistants in 1978.  The implications of this encounter still roll around in my brain. ‘Walk Away or Jump’. This was possibly one of the major turning points in my life – what did I turn down?  Fame, fortune?

In 1969 Robert Rauschenberg was invited by NASA to witness the lift-off of Apollo 11 at Kennedy Space Center and to use this theme in his work. He created a series of lithographs celebrating the astonishing achievements of the United States NASA Apollo Mission to the Moon. The Stoned Moon series was actually a double pun – the image of this historically groundbreaking event being put on lithographic stones and the feeling of being ’stoned’ metaphorically on one of the most important events in the history of man. Read original source url…

This series of lithographs were (and still are) a massive influence on my painting, printing and music. Images (sound) that is arbitrarily spliced together in an apparent random manor, will when juxtaposed against each other create a narrative. This meshing together of unrelated imagery may appear to be arbitrary but the intellectual decision making that goes with the process is absolutely phenomenal . It is therefore unrealistic to expect the uneducated masses to view these images as ‘real art’. The birth of Photoshop has enabled everybody to create ‘non-intellectual’ versions of Rauchenberg (and Warhol) – only the educated understand.

Roadtrips and long journeys hurtle undefined landscapes past your window. Star-shaped spears spin and pierce the night sky as they shoot from streetlights and mountains stand solid on the horizon as the trees in the foreground blur and streak across your eyes.

Click the image above for more image from a six day roadtrip with stopoffs in Brussels, Zurich (it was going to be Prague – but the German authorities banned us from their country on the outward journey) Zagreb, Munich, Ipers, passing through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and Germany.

It is possible to tell more about a landscape or object in a painting than to actually experience the real thing – the editing and generalization required in painting enables the experience of the landscape to be viewed in shorthand. The greatest trick is to imply this with the minimum of effort. Read more…

Below is a video of a previous exhibition

Napalm Exmoor National Park

Click here for press review

]]> http://peterbright.info/weblog/?feed=rss2&p=581 0 http://peterbright.info/weblog/?p=545 http://peterbright.info/weblog/?p=545#comments Wed, 24 Mar 2010 08:39:24 +0000 peter http://peterbright.info/weblog/?p=545

The harsh reality of trying to live the dream is sometimes far from ideal. Below is an extract of an article published in the Daily Mail today about or journey to that harsh reality.

Things have however got a lot better and we are actually enjoying the way things are turning out.

According to figures released by property consultants Drivas Jonas, the grand country-house property market has defied the credit crunch, with a 13 per cent increase in country house sales in 2008/9.

We had to make some compromises and come to terms with the fact that life was going to be very different. We got on top of the house, finishing all the jobs we’d become too despondent to tackle, and made it a home.

Peter had an art exhibition and sold all his paintings. The best thing was that the children were happy at their new schools.

Read more: Daily Mail

News on exhibition North Devon Festival Website

Topiary for Beginners
Category:  Visual Arts & Literature

Starts: Tuesday, June 01, 2010
Ends: Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Peter Bright presents ‘Topiary for Beginners’. Creating images is balancing on the knife edge that teeters between success and failure. A brushstroke out of place is like cutting the beak off a privet peacock, it takes time for it to grow back and reshape. Peter revisits his compositional ideas, formed in the late 70’s, to discover how his skills have ‘matured’.

Time: 11am to 4pm (Last admission 4pm)
Price Details: Free (entry fees apply for sculpture gardens)

Address: Broomhill Art Hotel , Barnstaple , Devon , EX31 4EX

Access: Good

Website: www.broomhillart.co.uk
Email: info@broomhillart.co.uk
Telephone: 01271 850262

Here is a couple of ideas for  paintings for the exhibition at Broomhill Art Hotel in June 2010.

Creativity is something we are all born with to greater or lesser degrees. It is a vital part of our physiological make up and development. We learn to play and fantasize as children, skills we carry forward into our adulthood. However, if creativity takes hold of your entire existence then it becomes a disease that is parasitic, eating away at your whole world. It might sound melodramatic but creativity can become a cancer of the body or the trigger for psychotic episodes.

Here are a couple of painting ideas I have come up with for the exhibition in June. I will most probably ditch this theme and do something completely different – but it was great fun doing!