Art came into my life as quite a shock. There was an art exam at school when I
was 14 and I did nothing but flick paint at people and generally draw
attention to myself, because I was deeply in love with the biology mistress who
was invigilating the exam, and then I saw the clock and I realised at half-past
three I had to hand in a painting, so I did one. And when the results came out
two or three weeks later I was top of art, so I thought it's worth looking into.
I took those first two landscapes to show Cedric Morris and Lett Haines who by
then had established the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing on the
outskirts of Hadley where I grew up, and that is really where life began, where
art began, I worked with Lett. He said, 'well, if you're going to be an artist you
must make your work your best friend, that you can go to it whatever you're
feeling. You're tired, you're bored, you're happy or randy, or whatever it is, go to
your work', and that's how I've lived my life.
This painting began as an attempt to paint early morning mist. It wasn't
working, and it wasn't working, and then I turned it upside down and this image of
my father just happened. I mean, it's to contradict that whole uncertainty of
what you see and don't see in mist and certainty, uncertainty about death, that just happened.
Well every portrait is a bit like a love affair, I mean it's a
very intimate thing. Henriette Marez was a force of nature, you know, she was named
as the queen of Soho and she was painted by Bacon, I think 15 times. She just took
over and I suddenly became her subject rather than she mine. I remember, I mean
in one of the paintings of her, she's getting in a terrible state about it
and she stopped posing and looked at it, and says
'don't be ridiculous, that's finished.' Well, I mean, you know that classic question
'how do you know when a painting is finished?', she said 'that one's finished.'
And I believed her and it was.
When she began to drink again, she got in the
fury of the said I'd 'stolen her soul' and, do you know that drawings of her are a sort of
dance of death, I suppose, a sort of battle between Henriette in the drink and in
the end the drink won.
You know the thing Brancusi said, 'it isn't difficult to make
a work of art, the difficulty lies in being in the right state to do it.'
Sort of emptying myself of all my baggage says that the subject, whether it was a person
or a wave or whatever it is, can come through me onto the canvas or into the
sculpture.
Watch out here.
The sculptures began, they were a sort of aftermath of the War Requiem installation
I realised that I'd collected over the years pieces of wood and suddenly began
to see how these could be sculpture. The pieces of wood in the first place would
suggest a head of some kind and I'd work on it and they were cast in bronze
Laugh of the laugh. Laughter, as a means of survival, has come back into the work
and that painting has gone on for a very long while indeed. I think it's
finished, but I might come in here the next morning and make one mark, which of
course can be fatal because once you've made one mark, you've probably got to do a few
hundred more, but at the moment I'm pleased with that painting.
You know, I live in a state of doubt, the whole thing, the whole time I can work on a painting
for two months, three months, more months, more months and a painting can come
alive and die many many times, but that painting can happen kind of quickly like
in the morning, or less, but it couldn't have happened unless you bugger it
around for several months, you know.
I go working in the hope that I might get a
bit better, you know, I mean unlike tennis players or ballet dancers we don't have
to stop and that's terrific.
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