This week I finished reading Bacon’s ‘Revelations’ and part of his interviews with David Sylvester. Both give a remarkable insight into his life and work of the attist but at the same time provide a level of frustration. His subject matter was not narrative or illustrative even though it seems to be both and he relied on ‘accident’ and ‘chance’, particularly in his early career. [1] Accident and chance are interesting terms.

Chance can be defined as ‘the absence of any cause of events that can be predicted, understood, or controlled: often personified or treated as a positive agency or a possibility or probability of anything happening’[2]. Many Abstract artists rely upon methods of practice described as using chance and accident, but I doubt that lack of control is one of them. The choice of surface, paint or applicator are more likely conscious choices. Even the automatic writing and drawing of the Dadaists needed materials. Secondly, unless the artist works with eyes closed [and even then] hand-eye coordination, the trained gestures of someone who has learned to write and a variety of other factors are not so much chance as controlled experiment. Bacon said that he regularly threw paint at a canvas and examined the result believing in its random nature to elicit ideas. In that he was throwing it in the direction of the canvas the chance element came down to direction and force. The more times he carried out this as a procedure, the more control he would have had.

Bacon said that he wanted the paint itself to convey emotion and much has been written about his brushwork over time. Considering that he had no art training, the naivety of his approach is what gave the early work its power and a piece such as Head 1 with its accumulated coagulation of paint is testament to endeavour but when a painting failed

he inevitably destroyed the canvases. By all accounts this could have amounted to thousands of paintings – the American press on the occasion of his first New York Show took great delight in headlining the destruction of 700 works as if that was in any way important. However, the idea of accident and chance, of pushing paint around a canvas until it resolved itself into some kind of motif or image, is far from unusual. Is it correct though to term this as ‘chance’.

I know any number of abstract artists who rely on seeming chance and accident and probably far more landscape painters who developed a tool box of chance experiments into a vocabulary of paint application to suggest natural forms. Bacon was no different.

What struck me on reading the book was that he spent the early years trying to find a way and the latter years working with a formula of sprayed on backgrounds and Baconesque figures that moved further and further away from the Three Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion.  Some critics considered that as he got older, the work simply became slicker and the repetition of the heads and popes was an attempt to return to where he began, when experiment was the key. This struck a chord. Is it the case that we all begin with hope, with risk taking, and then spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture that moment? Picasso certainly recognised the nature of the problem. “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” Of course, the older he got, the less possible it became, simply because he knew too much and could control too much. There is certainly as much praise for his later work as there are brickbats. If he believed that he was getting closer to a more childlike approach it was with the sensibility of an adult. Perhaps if he’d been senile, it would have helped.

Referring to the art of children though is a misnomer. The way children paint would seem to be to avoid chance altogether. Everything applied with a brush of other implement is a direct translation of an experience and while the explanation may seem bizarre to adults, the marks, lines and shapes make perfect sense [if that is even the word] to the child painter. In saying that children can’t draw [or paint] like adults begs the question as to why should they? The craving for adult approval and affection will soon enough render a childlike approach null and void.

So, beyond the seeking of adult approval, what is the difference between the work of children and that of adults that is lost so quickly.  Is it the freedom to use chance? Up to a certain age, children can’t appreciate the difference between fantasy and reality, let alone chance and control. That’s why they are sure that the events they have invented and translated into pictures or words exist in reality. Essentially, they don’t understand which knowledge is ‘true’ and which is ‘false.’ But then again, many adults live in a fantasy world, where they conjure up stories, and the likes of a Hieronymus Bosch seemed to believe that the hell he was depicting actually existed. What is true is that small children can’t think abstractly. The ability to reinvent the world is an adult concept. Linguist Noam Chomsky, recognises also that there is also a common toolbox built into a human’s brain that connects all syntax rules of all existing languages and allows for random associations to take place. We could call it imagination. By 10 years of age that begins to change. That is why the older you are, the harder it is for you to learn a new language or even create one. Perhaps Bacon did things in the right order. His lack of education and art training allowed him to experiment as an adult in ways that trained artists could not. His ‘chance’ was certainly ineptitude, but as an adult the possibility of paint containing emotion was a developed and sophisticated understanding of the nature of materials.

So, what in the end is chance for an artist? There are any number of amateur abstract painters and resin pourers with a firm belief in the physical ability of malleable paint to create something pleasant with little human intervention. It is good that they find simple satisfaction in doing so but, as with Bacon, an understanding of the nature of art as opposed to accident is key.

[1] Sylvester. D Conversations with Francis Bacon p6

[2] Dictionary.com.