Visualising Sentient Place: An Artist’s Study of Figure and Place through the Relationship of Francis Bacon's Paintings with his Reece Mews Studio

This thesis looks at the human figure as place, taking the example of the artist Francis Bacon and his studio at 7 Reece Mews, London, to understand how an artist can visualise ‘placed experience.’ Bacon said, “I am very influenced by places – by the atmosphere of a room.” I take this as a starting point to challenge the accepted ‘caged’ reading of his work. I argue that Bacon’s oeuvre grew out of initial ideas in his work as an interior designer, to question how the human figure can be pictured. His ‘sensitivity to places’ informed Bacon’s work and when he finally entered Reece Mews, aged 52, his work changed to reflect his own experience and milieu. Through a focus on edges in painting, considering the philosophy of Place by Edward S Casey, and Jeff Malpas, I outline how Bacon’s studio became intrinsic to his working process, due to the ‘chaotic’ detritus he collected around him, which allowed him to bypass ‘willed’ authorship, so he became “a vessel through which an image took shape.” The images that this extended self (or reversed self) created at Reece Mews lead to several late “figure paintings without figures,” where the body-figure is replaced with the place-figure. An image of the human figure as place; sentient place.