Louis le Brocquy, H.R.H.A. (b. 1916)

One of a series of paintings in oil and watercolour which le Brocquy made of his friend, Francis Bacon. 'With an oil, I usually make a very rough sketch in charcoal first. Then I take the brush, tip it with a little blue, say, on one side and a little Indian red ink on the other and I make these free gestures round the area of the eyebrow or the chin or wherever. And sometimes the the suggestion of an image - a kind of object trouvé, if you like - begins to emerge ... the emergent image is not so much made by me as imposing itself on me, accident by accident, with its own autonomous life'. He continued 'A great deal of the technical difficulty in these paintings comes from the fact that they are heads in utter isolation - without any particular circumstances, such as a collar and tie, or a recognizable background. Now the difficult thing in my view is to make this isolated head so that it doesn't look like a mere sketch, which it isn't, nor like some kind of decapitation. The image has to emerge from some plausable matrix, beyond habitual circumstance or environment, as if outside time' (interview with Michael Peppiat, published in Art International, October 1979; see D. Walker, Louis le Brocquy, Dublin, 1982, pp. 66-68).