LECTURE NOTES

MARITIME ANTIQUES ~

Kingsbridge Estuary Decorative And Fine Arts Society presents a very special and highly appropriate April lecture when well known antiques expert Paul Atterbury leaves his converted railway carriage home in Dorset to delve into the unusual and unknown in our great maritime tradition spanning centuries of high drama on the seas. Veteran of over 100 editions of BBC TV’s Antiques Roadshow Paul Atterbury claims his enthusiasm for antiques started in the pram. He describes the role of roadshow expert as “Part doctor, part priest, someone who can send people away feeling glad they’ve come to the roadshow, even if their object is quite worthless in commercial terms”. KEDFAS members will certainly be equally glad they came to hear Paul and - for this special lecture only, as part of our 15^th birthday celebrations – they are invited to bring a guest free of charge. Other non-members are warmly invited to join them for a fee of £6 if numbers permit. Please contact 01548 856227 for Wednesday or 01548 550228 for Thursday. The lectures are at Kingsbridge Community College, Balkwill Road at 8pm on Wednesday 23^rd April and at The Reel Cinema, Fore Street, Kingsbridge at 10.30 am on Thursday 24^th April.

KINGSBRIDGE ESTUARY DECORATIVE & FINE ARTS SOCIETY FACE UP TO FRANCIS BACON ~

May Lecture

Linda Smith, our expert speaker from the Tate, gave a fascinating and wide ranging perspective on a man who is seen by many as the most significant British painter of the twentieth century.

Francis Bacon is not a likely candidate for the sainthood.   As a militant atheist who saw humans as ‘offal sacks’, his inclinations were towards the fleshly nature of human existence, pleasure and pain.   Expelled from his family home at the age of sixteen and with no formal art college training, he left us with only selective glimpses of his early life, including a spell in furniture design and wartime experience running an illegal gambling den in London.  Francis Bacon suddenly made his mark in 1944 with his three studies for a Frieze at the Base of the Crucifixion, the start of forty years’ work, his earlier efforts being consigned to the bin.

Certain themes haunt his pictures, some described as ‘images so unrelievedly awful’ – screaming mouths, consternation, figures trapped in small space frames, claustrophobia, deformed half animals with apparent human characteristics, the avenging furies of Greek drama, malevolence, sides of flesh and incomplete heads merging into a dark void. In terms of technique, he sometimes used a dry, gritty texture and painted on the rougher side of the canvas; by the 1970’s he was clearly in control of colour and demonstrated a delicate, refined use of paint despite his somewhat violent images.

Bacon’s art often used earlier paintings, from Velasquez’ portrait of Pope Innocent X, Rembrandt’s animal carcass and the dismembered bodies of Picasso’s Guernica, to photographic images of naked wrestlers and Goebbels rousing the masses. He defied religion but liked the curve of medieval crucifixions. It was said of his portraits that he ‘demolished faces and then brought them to a likeness’. Bacon had no time for abstract art: his work looks like an assault on traditional painting but put by the side of much modern art some clear links with the old masters begin to emerge. He would have appreciated this: he continued to paint in the figurative tradition when abstract art was the predominant fashion.

He defies definition as a person. Despite a dissolute lifestyle, Francis Bacon was a disciplined painter and an early riser, somehow emerging from chaotic living conditions looking neat and dapper. The trappings of fame were an irrelevance but he enjoyed manipulating the media.

A Francis Bacon triptych sold for £44 million in New York recently. If you don’t like his paintings, somebody else does. Look out for the Bacon bonanza in 2009, the centenary of his birth, with retrospective exhibitions opening as early as this Autumn.

The next KEDFAS lecture, ‘The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages of Discovery’, is on 25^th and 26^th June.

For further details of KEDFAS Lectures, Visits, Tours and Study Days visit www.kedfas.org.uk or email kedfasinfo@yahoo.com