Francis Bacon was never the happy-go-lucky type, which you could probably infer from this hell-scale that he calls From Muybridge 'The Human Figure In Motion: Women Emptying a Bowl of Water / Paralytic Child Walking on all Fours'.

As the title indicates, this painting was inspired by two series of photographs by Eadweard Muybridge – the guy who was semi-responsible for the invention of film because of his photographs of things in motion. This painting was thought up after Bacon saw Muybridge’s series of photographs of a paralyzed child walking on all fours and another series of a naked lady pouring water on the ground. Muybridge’s photographs are mildly alarming and make you feel pretty weird inside. But he is nothing compared to the messed up sh*t that Bacon thinks up and puts your work through upon seeing it. That was Bacon’s thing though. He believed that the world was a cruel, tortured place devoid of hope, which is probably the result of his having seen two “world wars, the Holocaust, the Atom Bomb,… the Cold War,” and the AIDS crisis. There’s not a lot that could convince you of the good in the world after all of that.

This painting contains Bacon’s classic monster-like figures, whose “faces are diseased, mouths gape with rotting teeth, [and] bodies horrifically mutilated.” The child and woman are something straight out of a horror film, which causes you both a morbid fascination with them and a desperate need to look away. It’s all very confusing and off-putting. And as if the figures themselves weren’t enough, they are walking around what looks like a trampoline-like death trap and seem like they are about to fall at any moment. This of course causes viewers that feeling of panic before you fall backwards in a chair, but instead of it being a momentary, the feeling lasts for as long as you look at the work. If the figures and the panic-y feeling weren’t enough, then you can get really freaked out by the jarring and seemingly rancid colors of the piece that really tie the whole thing together into a sick and twisted nightmare of a painting. It’s awesome.