Paradoxically, both the life and work of Francis Bacon is both highly conventional and iconoclastic. As an artist he painted on traditional easel canvases - though preferring the roughened untreated back to the smooth front - using oil paint, and demanded that his work when shown in galleries be given respectful gilt frames. At the same time there was a powerful subversive element in his compositions with much of his chosen subject matter searingly autobiographical. These often dealt with his own homosexuality, his intimate and often anguished relationships, and his own uneasy association with the world in general. Although Bacon may have described himself as queer in the old-fashioned sense he can with some justification be described as a queer artist, using Philip Derbyhire’s concept of “this violent rejection and despoliation of the norm by the exiled.
i think he is fucking rad
even if he is a little weird
