Tuesday 2nd December....drove down to Oxford to see the Bacon/Moore exhibition at the Ashmolean museum in Oxford. First impressions were that there was far too much of Moore's work & far too little Bacon. Moore's work doesn't do much for me. I appreciate his exploration of form and experimentation combining geometry with figuration, but somehow his stuff always leaves me cold. In this case his work suffered even worse from being displayed indoors, since many of his sculptures were made expressly with outdoor display in mind.
On the other hand I felt there was far too little of Bacon's work, but in this I am undoubtedly biased, since he is one of my favourite painters. Regardless, it was most rewarding to finally see some of his works close up, and appreciate for the first time his masterful brushwork, the full richness of his colours, and his use of impasto technique in many of his faces, which increases the tortured aspect of his distortions. For a long time I have loved Bacon's work for the way he captures a sense of motion within his pieces, and finally seeing, albeit a small selection, of his canvases up close was a richly rewarding experience which I hope to learn from in my own practice, by developing a more distorted shape of the figures I produce, and experimenting with a more active brush stroke.
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