Pushing Boundaries: Lessons from Bacon, Bowie, and the Brave

In Lucian Freud’s birthday week, I thought I’d write a blog post about Francis Bacon.

There’s nothing quite like a Francis Bacon exhibition to remind you that life is equal parts grotesque, tragic, and utterly captivating.  Standing before his raw, twisted canvases, I found myself trying to look intellectual while simultaneously wondering if it’s appropriate to crave a cup of tea amidst so much existential crisis.  Truth be told, I was unnerved on a visceral level.

And so began my spiral of thoughts on risk-taking. Naturally, Bowie joined the party. (He always does - partly because he personified pushing boundaries, and partly because my dog, Bowie, rarely leaves my side.) As it happens, David Bowie was a voracious reader and named Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester his number 1 book. It makes perfect sense - both men tore up the rulebook: Bacon with his screaming portraits, Bowie with his entire existence.

This shared obsession with risk and reinvention got me thinking about essays. Yes, essays. Writing a truly exceptional essay also requires audacity. You can’t just paddle around in the shallow waters of ‘obvious analysis’.  The best essays don’t play it safe; they take risks. They ask, “What if we look at it this way?”

Othello: a safe essay might explore the identity of the characters.  But a bold essay?  That could tackle the play as a thesis on the inevitability of shifting identity, as, after all, the play starts out as a comedy.   This kind of boundary-pushing is in essence the IB Learner Profile’s ‘risk-taker’.  The IB doesn’t want students to simply regurgitate their teachers’ greatest hits; it wants them to explore, question, and - yes - occasionally get it spectacularly wrong so by the time exam day rolls around the difficult thinking has shaped a really interesting approach to the essay.  The point isn’t perfection; it’s learning to think.

At The LangLit Studio, this philosophy is central to my online English tuition.  Whether it’s A Level or IB, my students learn that essays aren’t polite conversations; they’re debates, experiments, even arguments (minus the flailing and shouting).  Taking intellectual risks - trying a new interpretation, challenging the status quo - is how you truly level up.

So, if your brave, Bowie-inspired teenager wants to write essays that make examiners (like myself) sit up and take notice, get in touch, thelanglitstudio@gmail.com.  Because if Bacon taught us anything, it’s that playing it safe is so last century.