Name: Adrianna Keczmerska
Tutor's name: Matt Moseley Group 3
Word count: 453 words
In this essay I am going to talk about two pieces of work , analyse them, say what they repressent, how they were made and what they both have in common. My chosen art works are; Still from Battleship Potemkin 1925 dir Eisenstein and Self portrait by Francis Bacon 1971.
The self portrait by Francis Bacon is a beautiful and quite abstract painting which he painted oil on canvas in 1971 and as the title of the work says, it is an image of him. He used quite unusual shapes, such as egg shaped circles around the eyes, completely out of shape nose and what appears only a half of the lips. Also the head looks slightly bigger than the body which makes the portrait a bit out of proportion. The colours he used are quite unusual for a portrait as well, although I think the purple, white, blue and yellow work well with the black background and the shapes of the face to create a touch of perhaps imperfections on Bacon’s face which might in fact reflect how he saw himself and that makes this piece of work really personal.
The second art work is a screen shot taken out from Battleship Potemkin 1925 dir Eisenstein which is a silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein which presents a dramatized version of the mutiny that occurred in 1905 when the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin rebelled against their officers of the Tsarist regime. The picture is in black and white seeing as it is a very old film and it shows a face of a man. His mouth and both eyes are wide open and we can imagine that he is screaming in horror. Also his hair looks a mess. The shades on the man’s face are nice and I like the fact we can’t always see the lines of his face against the white background. It is a close up of his face therefore I can not see what is going on in the whole scene.
I like these two pieces of work because both, Francis Bacon and Sergei Eisenstein leave something to the viewer’s imagination seeing as we don’t really know why Bacon has decided to use such colours and shapes in his self portrait and why Eisenstein used such a close up in this particular scene, which I think is good because there can be just as many different interpretations about the two art works.
I personally prefer the first art work which is Bacon’s self portrait because I like the various colours and shapes he used in order to show the world the way he sees himself. I think everyone could compare themselves to this piece of work.
