So there’s this swine flu thing, maybe you’ve heard about it…
I was feeling topical yesterday evening, and I started doing my thing on the Internet (it’s a gift), researching (if you can call it that) pig-related art for a possible post. I was thinking swine, I was thinking pork, naturally I was thinking bacon.
So I Googled “bacon art,” expecting to find hipsterrific images of bacon – the bacon bra, the bacon briefcase, bacon bandages, that kind of stuff. And instantly I realized I’d been spending way too much time on the Internet lately and not enough time reading art books, because, yep, searching for “bacon art” also brought up the works of British painter Francis Bacon.
But that’s where things got weird. Google might give you different results than it did me, depending on your search settings and which server you’re hitting, so I’ll post some photos here in a sec, but take a look at the results, just for fun. Are you seeing what I’m seeing?
The portraits of Francis Bacon look a lot like…bacon.
Note the swirling browns and pinks, the delicious marbling.
Still don’t see it?
How about the bacon strips hanging down in Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X?
Why those colors? Why that oily goodness? Why the Pope? Why bacon, Bacon?
Da Vinci had his code. Maybe you have yours too.
