Portrait of Francis Bacon with Study for Portrait of Van Gogh III
"Van Gogh is the greatest painter after all, for me—the most spontaneous." — Francis Bacon
This work inhabits a strange lineage of artistic inheritance. Francis Bacon appears before Study for Portrait of Van Gogh III, his celebrated reimagining of Van Gogh, creating a chain of visions that stretches across generations. Van Gogh becomes Bacon; Bacon becomes image; image becomes memory.
Rather than seeking likeness, Harman pursues something less stable and more profound: the residue of presence. The portrait hovers between emergence and disappearance, as though the figure is being summoned from paint, history, and recollection simultaneously. Fragments dissolve, surfaces tremble, and form remains perpetually unfinished.
Harman's distinctive digital painting technique extends the expressive possibilities of the medium, transforming pixels into a painterly field charged with uncertainty and psychological intensity. The work is not concerned with representation alone, but with the deeper question that has haunted painting for centuries: how does one make visible the force of a human spirit?
Here, Bacon stands before his own homage to Van Gogh, while Harman enters the conversation as both observer and participant. The result is a meditation on artistic influence, where every image carries the ghost of another, and where creation becomes an act of perpetual becoming rather than completion.
The painting suggests that great artists do not merely depict the world; they remake it, again and again, through the eyes of those who follow.
