SELVES PORTRAIT

Art as exploration, art as research, art as therapy. Not all art is intended to be looked at, admired, loved. The freedom, the playfulness, the sheer naughtiness, the beauty of creating unplanned, ugly art.

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Does the artist need to love their own work, to like it even?

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Scrape beneath the layers of Painting 1946 (detail below, Francis Bacon) and we would first discover a bird of prey, and underneath that, a gorilla in a cornfield. Only after 'playing' with these concepts, these images, these shapes, did Bacon see the form of the mouth, the chin and the umbrella that we now see on the surface.