"I need the city; I need to know there are people around me strolling, arguing, f**king—living, and yet I go out very rarely; I stay here in my cage. I should have been, I don’t know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance."
Oooh I love Francis Bacon, but he gives me the willies all the same. Kind of in the same way Hannibal Lector does from Silence of the Lambs. He was a rather interesting man who had a love for disfigurement, isolation and distorted and tortured images. Originally an interior designer he slipped into painting in later life. His following steadily grew, while the critics remained divided. Even Margaret Thatcher had an opinion referring to him as "that man who paints those dreadful pictures."
Despite his fame Bacon felt like it was all a bit hopeless. He described life as 'ridiculous'. "Even as a child, I knew [life] was impossible, a kind of charade."
A close friend Michael Peppiatt remarked Bacon could "light up the day with his wit and generosity; he could equally well plunge it into gloom; and part of the excitement of being with him lay in not knowing for long which way it would go. It was fascinating to watch such sudden changes and contradictions within one person...Bacon could not be pinned down. The closer you got to him, the more likely he was to turn nasty or simply disappear -- to go through a wall into a life where you could not follow"
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