Francis Bacon (1909-1992) was an Irish-born British painter who thought of himself as a maker of images. For him the image mattered more than the beauty of the paint and he knew that the only way to grasp reality was to transform shapeless masses of sensation into images.

In ‘Study of a Figure in a Landscape’ (198.1cm x 137.7cm), a sombre and quiet painting, a man squats in a field. The man seems like an animal, his posture and the blurred effect resembles a shadow. He is the only heavily painted element in the painting. The background is an ochre field of long waving grass and there is an apparent disconnection between the figure and the background. The painting is part of the landscape theme of the English paintings in the Phillips Collection in Washington DC. —S.I.K.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, May 25th, 2014