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  • Writer's pictureBelinda Keyte

Artist Research - Week 3: Nicola Tyson

Nicola Tyson (born 1960 in London) is a Britsh painter who llives in New York. Her work is primarily concerned with issues of gender, sexuality and identity.


I’m researching a particular project of Tysons, the book ‘Dead Letter Men’. In fact I want to focus on one particular letter. The one that inspired my project this semester. The one to Francis Bacon.

Nicola Tyson, excerpt from Dead Letter Men, 2013, Sadie Coles HQ, London


Well written, highly researched and long. Four pages long. I think my letter to Prince did need a little bit of editing to be more pointed but I have to remember these are the works. My letters. So this was encouraging. I giving myself the allowance to not worry so much about length. Using one paragraph word count and visually estimating the letter to be around 880 words, so my edited letter is still a bit longer. But not much.


Tyson uses humour and she does not hold back. Getting personal in regards to sexuality and physical appearance. As well as Bacon’s work. After all, the artists are dead and the purpose of the letter is leading up to a point. And I guess her use of swearing and even lewdness, crassness helps to make that point…or is it mimicry of Bacon himself?


Tyson starts the letter really introducing herself and her ties to the artist. I particularly like how she addresses the artist, often asking him a question like ‘Right Francis?’ But then answers it herself.


When delving into, I guess, Bacon’s contemporary (if there was one…or community of practice) Lucien Freud, there was a mention of a Leigh Bowery. Turns out Bowery, a ‘flamboyant’ performance artist, club promoter and fashion designer, was born in Sunshine, here in Melbourne and even went to RMIT, studying fashion design.

Tyson makes her point by leading on to Isabel Hawthorne. How she was so often immortalised by male artists, and these were quite famous. How important she was to so many great men. Yet she was pretty good as an artist too and there’s no book on her.

She actually doesn’t talk much about either Bacon’s or Freud’s work much. More their private lives, personalities, fame and / or career’s. But I guess that’s what her work as an artist is about.


I can’t believe I read this once and wrote the Prince letter, rewriting it again and again over the last 17 months and the similarities are uncanny. Yet I feel my letter is very much me and that I made it my own. Reading this letter again actually made me feel as excited about this project as writing my initial letter did. I’m going to enjoy this project.

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