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Doris A. Day talking with Christopher Bucklow,
Frome, 20th September 2012
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C. Choices are very significant, very telling of the individual making the choice... Why Bacon, for you?
D. I don't know... it just seemed like an enormous challenge...
C. But there are plenty of artists who would be big challenges. Why him?
D. There's a harmonious beauty in the way he perceived the body. I feel that it's more real than any other kind of portraiture.
C. Like him, you seem to be interested in suggesting other things than external appearance.
D. Yes, though my primary source is British portraiture - looking back at Reynolds, Lawrence, Gainsborough - but I was looking more... not at actual representation, more of a psychological representation and the way that if you remember someone that you met, you don't remember particular features, you remember fleeting things.
C. Aside from physical appearance?
D. Yes, aside from an eye, an ear... I just wanted to get the fleeting instance of memory.
C. Picasso does it, ...I suppose anyone who distorts the figure...
D. Yes but I don't find it believable in Picasso. It's like a painting of another picture, whereas Bacon was almost turning something inside out and pressing it onto the canvas, like an imprint of something that's real.
C. So that gets us closer to why you honed in on Bacon, and that's an interesting choice you've made. But what about the people, in the portraits? I saw the painting of the old bald man with the moustache and the glittering colour on the left side of his face and I thought, "Is that H. G. Wells or J. P. Morgan?"
D. Yes... it's J.P Morgan. You got the reference. I saw that photograph...
C. The Steichen photograph of around 1900...
D. It's a harrowing powerful image.
C. So why J.P.? I know we choose things and ninety percent of the time we have no access to knowledge of our motives....
D. I don't know. I don't want the reference to be explicit... to bankers, the present economic climate...
C. I suppose most people wouldn't recognize him anyway, my knowing him was just chance. It's not important. Actually, now I come to think of it, what he reminds me of is that Velazquez of the Pope that Bacon obsessed about... a bully...
D. He's got a grip on something, ballasting himself down, and you interpret the chair arm he's got hold of in the photograph, as a dagger. It's a powerful image.
C. He's an archetype. A powerful male.
But I was concentrating on the 'abstract' side of his face, the jewel-box of non-representational colour. It felt like that star-cluster, the Pleiades... the Pleiades in a suit and tie... It's an interesting juxtaposition....
D. It was the urge to let the paint be the flesh, not represent it, but be it. And like actually smearing paint on this guy's face.
C. If that's a psychological portrait... if that's psyche - that side of the face... it's like ectoplasm... but can you say anything about why that form incarnated with that face?
D. It's a new series.... I don't know. I suppose it's not the psyche of J.P. Morgan. It's my psyche, projected. Maybe it's my reaction to him rather than his actual... it's hard to say... it's the beginning of a series.
C. What about the erasing, in some of the other pictures, you are clearly removing paint from the whole face? The effect it leaves is like surging liquid... and you use it as the portrait...
D. When I think about panic or fear... I feel like the blood running out of the face. It's a psychological reaction. That's how I would portray panic... I suppose it's like the essence of Bacon's Popes.
C. But the erasing...
D. It's just a natural thing, being the artist and wanting to represent something you want to say, and when it fails, it's just natural to get a palette knife and scrape it off. And sometimes those inadvertent marks left behind are the most beautiful things about it.
C. Well there are two sides to it... the resonance of the act of erasure, it has a meaning.... But then you get something, something else, from the losing something... You get something unwilled...
D. Uncontrived, yes. A face can be looking to the right and when you scrape it off, what remains appears like it was looking to the left. Something you don't expect....
C. We are not always comfortable with will. The erasing leaves things that feel inevitable.
D. You can set up these mistakes though. You can contrive your accidents. Though I'm more of an irrational; more gung-ho, anarchic.
C. What about your colour? It's very vibrant in places...
D. An abstract series I'd done before this... there the colour was almost too strong, almost comical. In this new series I wanted to integrate that palette into the portraits, to see where they collided.
C. In the abstract.... 'passages', is that a good word? ...
D. Flirtations...
C. Yes, a much better word... the colour is very energized.
D. In the last series it was very jarring. But I wanted to take it away from being satire.
C. Satire never occurs to me here.
D. Good. I'm trying to get away from it.
C. It's interesting... the gravity of why something sits... unsatirically... why something feels right, authentic... this is very telling of an artist's motives and nature... So what I'm seeing is a serious and beautiful representation of psychic reality. And that's also what I get out of Bacon.
D. Yes, and Bacon never thought of his portraits as distorted.
C. One last question... Freud... you use him in the title to this series. Should we pay attention to that?
D. No, ....it's a Charlie Mingus track. The title seems weighted, but the more you think about it, the less you get from it. It's quite apt for the beginning of a series.
September - October, 2012
The Toolshed Gallery, Frome
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