​Painting 1946, by Lucy Wright

Painting, by Francis Bacon (England) 1946

​Painting 1946

In the foreground of his abattoir, with an oval of a silent-screaming mouth and eyes dark and sunken (as studied in Rembrandt’s self-portraits), the umbrella conceals the top of the figure’s face. In a black circumference, his bottom set of teeth protrude forward in a force of agony. Red gums. Red, pulsating muscle. 

The brute, the beauty of pink pigs raw and naked flesh. 

Veins in bone-white toile de Jouy map the entire canvas in ribbons of fat across the tendons of the crucifixion. Trotters raised. A spine cut out, placed on a silver plate of rounded steel inside the figure’s geometric entrapment. There is no room for sound but the frisson of a nervous system that has struck the canvas. He has imprisoned his subject within the seduction of oil-on-linen. 

Lucy Wright

Lucy Wright is a third year PhD Candidate in Leeds. Her research and fiction centres around the works of Francis Bacon, and the significance of Modernism(s) and Ekphrasis in the process of his prolific artwork. Originally from the North East, Lucy now lives and teaches workshops on the importance of the Arts in Yorkshire for national organisations. She also occasionally writes articles for the Modernist Review and other journals alongside her love for ekphrastic poetry.