Francis Bacon’s Frightening Beauty
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Another interesting aspect of Bacon was his work schedule. It’s a miracle he lived as long as he did (to age 82.)
From Daily Rituals:
To the outside observer, Bacon appeared to thrive on disorder. His studios were environments of extreme chaos, with paint smeared on the walls and a knee-high jumble of books, brushes, papers, broken furniture, and other detritus piled on the floor. (More agreeable interiors stifled his creativity, he said.) And when he wasn’t painting, Bacon lived a life of hedonistic excess, eating multiple rich meals a day, drinking tremendous quantities of alcohol, taking whatever stimulants were handy, and generally staying out later and partying harder than any of his contemporaries.
Edit: just adding to this, because I’m sure someone will mention it. Bacon did indeed paint in his early twenties and even had an exhibition or two, but reviews were bad and he gave up art for a ~decade. So, I count that as “not really painting.”
The tech industry has this weird habit of "inspiring" people to get into tech because they could build the next facebook or google.
In reality, engineering/software can land you in a very comfortable lifestyle if you're good at it and I think more people should be focusing their efforts on becoming better engineers for that middle class lifestyle, rather than trying and failing to create the next big thing all the time.
That's a perfectly acceptable plan if it fits into your personal vision for yourself.
Some people want to create things and make a business out of it. They want the full gamut of experience, including the hard times that can come with it.
I'm one of those people. I left a very well paid gig to bootstrap my company and grind it out. I've learned so much and I employ 10 people. I value that and it gives me a lot of satisfaction. It's just how I have fun and get enjoyment out of life.
I would advise against chasing "a billion dollars" though. Chasing that kind of money is more likely than not an ego play (catering to your ego rarely leads anywhere of value), and yes, the odds are against you.
You can, with reasonable odds, build a good business. I recently read somewhere that most successful businesses are started by people in their 40s, which makes sense.
> For anyone who hasn't started a billion dollar startup, you're probably not going to
Wait, is this considered old now? I recognize that you're fighting the good fight against ageism and giving up. But by painting Bacon as an exceptional case, you're also helping reinforce the myth that of you're not wildly successful by 35, you've missed the boat.
I have a hard time believing that Bacon's case is such an outlier. I never collected the data but i know of plenty artists and entrepreneurs who started in their thirties, forties and older.
And he was 36 when he published general relativity.
Which was his last really big achievement. Of course he still continued to produce a ton of work, many individual pieces of which would be considered a capstone achievement for many ordinary physicists.
But a lot of his effort was spent on a unified field theory that never really came together. And a lot was spent on trying to prove that quantum mechanics was incomplete -- which turned out to have some useful discoveries that largely affirm that QM is complete (at least within its domain).
In other words, he kinda was a model of somebody who did his best work before his mid-30s, and spent the rest of his career merely being very, very smart.
I see what you did there.
For me, BTW, bacon is one of those mouthgasm foods that make it impossible to think coherently.
It juxtaposes the source material Bacon used for his paintings (pictures, film, other painting mostly by Velazquez etc.) with the eventual paintings.
This is briefly mentioned in the New Yorker article but a fascinating aspect of his work: he was remixing / paraphrasing all the time!
Apropos of nothing, I've wondered if there's a sly Bacon joke in Killing Eve. In the second season, Villanelle sees a painting of a man hung upside down, insides slit open. She comments that "they look like bacon". While from the character's perspective it's likely that she's just comparing the people to food, it does work well as an art joke cause the painting truly does have the same macabre feel of a Francis Bacon
Just because one finds such dark visions of humanity fascinating doesn't mean you want to hurt anyone. I've never seen a shred of evidence that such people are any more prone to violence (much less serial killing) than anyone else.
If anything, there's an argument to be made for the cathartic value of such art, and its those who don't have such an outlet who I'd be more worried about.