Disrupting Optical Coherence by Sean Sheehan
The painter Francis Bacon is known for his glutinous depictions of raging pressures and mobilities at work in the human organism and manifesting in distorted body parts and bruised flesh ruptured from within. Peter Beard is best known for his photographs of African wilderness and, in particular, die-offs of elephants en masse in Kenya. If artist and adventurer Beard was ‘half-Tarzan, half-Byron’, as one writer described him, Bacon’s blend of modernism and morbidity could make him half-Picasso (‘the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint’) and half-hypochondriac. Both Bacon and Beard possessed highly distinctive chemistries and perhaps this has something to do with them finding shared sensibilities and becoming lifelong friends. They first met in the mid-1960s.
