October Notes - 2025
While reading Fiona MacCarthy’s biography of Eric Gill, the English sculptor and designer, I was not only shocked by his behavior (read below), but also by the author’s matter-of-fact way of depicting it. Throughout history, we have had artists who behaved badly. In this “woke” era (I say that proudly), the inclination has been to “ghost” these artists. I advocate for something more nuanced. Let’s neither hide the facts nor erase the art. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t specific artworks I would like to stick a knife through, but that isn’t necessarily due to the bad behavior of the artist.
HISTORY SPOTLIGHT: ARTISTS BEHAVING BADLY
I don’t want euphemism. I don’t want erasure. I can acknowledge unforgivable acts and still argue the work belongs in public, framed honestly. I don’t want the truth whitewashed, and I don’t want the art erased. The real discipline is holding contradictory facts in your head without sanding them down, letting the discomfort do its work.
READ MORE . . .
AT THE MOVIES: LOVE IS THE DEVIL: STUDY FOR A PORTRAIT OF FRANCIS BACON
Film clip from “Love is the Devil: Study for a portrait of Francis Bacon”
Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998) is John Maybury’s stylized, unsentimental look at the toxic love affair between Francis Bacon (Derek Jacobi) and George Dyer (Daniel Craig), a small-time thief who becomes the painter’s muse and foil amid 1960s Soho’s booze, clubs, and cruelty. It swaps tidy biopic beats for a claustrophobic mood that echoes Bacon’s canvases—fittingly, the film shows none of his actual paintings after the estate refused permission, so the cinematography supplies the distortion and dread. Strand Releasing+2Rotten Tomatoes+2 — I am not a fan of Francis Bacon, but I love Derek Jacobi in what must have been a challenging role. A great companion to this might be Camille Claudel (1988) – Not “crime,” but power and exploitation are the engine; a raw look at the Rodin–Claudel dynamic. Roger Ebert. Rodin behaved sufficiently badly that Claudel ended up in a mental hospital.
FROM THE LIBRARY: FIONA MACCARTHY’S ERIC GILL
This is the book that prompted this post. Ugh. You may know Gill for his font, that sits on most of our computers. Eric Gill was in and around the Bloomsbury Group, part of the Arts and Crafts movement, and a religious wack-job (in my humble opinion). He also had incest with his two sisters and three daughters. This was handled so lightly in this biography, which is a slight improvement over others that left it out entirely, that I found it shocking and inexplicable. Perhaps Gill was from the school of “the more you sin, the more you are forgiven.” And why does exaggerated religious behavior so often go together with abhorrent sexual behavior?
I was amused that he chose the image of a couple making love with the woman on top for a graphic design for the Suffrage Movement. It’s a unique take on voting rights, that’s for sure.
FEATURED ART
Luminous Morning, 48 inches x 60 inches, oil paint and acylic marker on canvas. (Click image for more details)
This is a painting I thought was finished, until it wasn’t. I returned to it this summer and kept working, layer upon layer, until something entirely new began to emerge. The process took me somewhere unfamiliar, even unsettling, and I wasn’t sure whether the painting would survive it. Some works reach that point where they’ll either come alive or be lost completely. Luminous Morning finally resolved itself after months of uncertainty, and now it feels like a threshold into new territory.