FRANCIS BACON 2

Francis Bacon:

“Tell me, who today has been able to record anything that comes across to us as a fact without causing deep injury to the image?”

Sebastian Smee, on page 54 of The Art of Rivalry, attributes the above quote to Bacon.

Bacon’s eloquent statement addresses things that are critical to Transparent Drawing.  They first mention the word fact.  They discuss the act of recording something, and that recording, or drawing, can produce a fact.  VISUAL FACTS are something that continue to inform our thinking and our approach.

Yet Bacon asks an amazing question.  Can the act of drawing cause deep injury to the image?  Can the act of recording the object with such clarity that it becomes a fact, then harm the object?  It can if you don’t record it with sufficient accuracy.  Damage occurs if you simply record representationally.

The act of drawing is to establish truth.  We draw to establish facts.  And the image of the object is not damaged when the entire object is resolved, which can only be done with Transparent Drawing.

So this is the long way of answering Bacon, yes, you can draw the truth of an object without damaging it.  I believe that my drawing above is not damaging as it is a visual fact.  It addresses the truth of the building on the left.  I think Bacon would be happy.

We looked at another of Francis Bacon’s thoughts at the page FRANCIS BACON.  On that page, as we saw, Bacon was after truth.

1.   Smee, Sebastian.  The Art of Rivalry.  Random House,  New York.  2016.