I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.
Bacon, Francis."Quoted." in: Gruen, John. The Artist Observed: 28 interviews with contemporary artists. A Cappella Books. 1991. Hardcover, 320 pages, Language English, ISBN: 1556521030.
Painting is a duality and abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on one level. It is only really interesting in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes.
Bacon, Francis.
In my case all painting... is an accident. I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. id otn’ in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do.
Bacon, Francis.
Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint.
Bacon, Francis.
All painting is an accident. But it’s also not an accident, because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve.
Bacon, Francis.
You want accuracy, but not representation. If you know how to make the figuration, it doesn’t work. Anything you can make, you make by accident. In painting, you have to know what you do, not how, when you do it.
Bacon, Francis.
I want a very ordered image, but I want it to come about by chance.
Bacon, Francis.
You see, painting has now become, or all art has now become completely a game, by which man distracts himself. What is fascinating actually is, that it’s going to become much more difficult for the artists, because he must really deepen the game to become any good at all.
Bacon, Francis.
I believe in deeply ordered chaos.
Bacon, Francis.
All colours will agree in the dark.
Bacon, Francis.
Some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tell you the story in a long diatribe through the brain.
Bacon, Francis.
If you can talk about it, why paint it?
Bacon, Francis.
It’s always hopeless to talk about painting - one never does anything but talk around it.
Bacon, Francis.
I would like my picture to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail leaving its trail of the human presence... as a snail leaves its slime.
Bacon, Francis.
Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence - a reconcentration... tearing away the veils that fact acquires through time.
Bacon, Francis.
Painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down.
Bacon, Francis.
The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure; it’s a little like making love, the physical act of love.
Bacon, Francis.
If you want to convey fact, this can only ever be done through a form of distortion. You must distort to transform what is called appearance into image.
Bacon, Francis.
The feeling of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.
Bacon, Francis.
If I sit and daydream, the images rush by like a succession of colored slides.
Bacon, Francis.
All of our actions take their hue from the complexion of the heart, as landscapes their variety from light.
Bacon, Francis.
Very few people have a natural feeling for painting, and so, of course they naturally think that painting is an expression of the artist’s mood. But it rarely is. Very often he may be in greatest despair and be painting his happiest paintings.
Bacon, Francis.
Before I start painting I have a slightly ambiguous feeling: happiness is a special excitement because unhappiness is always possible a moment later.
Bacon, Francis.
Good fame is like fire; when you have kindled you may easily preserve it; but if you extinguish it, you will not easily kindle it again.
Bacon, Francis.
It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear.
Bacon, Francis.
An illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact.
Bacon, Francis.
A graceful and pleasing figure is a perpetual letter of recommendation.
Bacon, Francis.
I would like, in my arbitrary way, to bring one nearer to the actual human being.
Bacon, Francis.
Ideas always acquire appearance veils, the attitudes that people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils.
Bacon, Francis.
Images also help me find and realize ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people’s plates.
Bacon, Francis.
You could say that I have no inspiration, that I only need to paint.
Bacon, Francis.
I have to hope that my instincts will do the right thing, because I can’t erase what I have done. And if I drew something first, then my paintings would be illustrations of drawings.
Bacon, Francis.
As you work, the mood grows on you. There are certain images which suddenly get hold of me and I really want to do them. But it’s true to say that they excitement and possibilities are in the working and obviously can only come in the working.
Bacon, Francis.
I should have been, I don’t know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance.
Bacon, Francis.
No artist knows in his own lifetime whether what he does will be the slightest good, because it takes at least seventy-five to a hundred years before the thing begins to sort itself out.
Bacon, Francis.
One always starts work with the subject, no matter how tenuous it is, and one constructs an artificial structure by which one can trap the reality of the subject-matter that one has started from.
Bacon, Francis.
A picture should be a re-creation of an event rather than an illustration of an object; but there is no tension in the picture unless there is a struggle with the object.
Bacon, Francis.
All artists are vain, they long to be recognized and to leave something to posterity. They want to be loved, and at the same time they want to be free. But nobody is free.
Bacon, Francis.
If my people look as if they in a dreadful fix, it’s because I can’t get them out of a technical dilemma.
Bacon, Francis.
I loathe my own face, and I’ve done self-portraits because I’ve had nobody else to do.
Bacon, Francis.
I’ve had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models...I couldn’t attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn’t know...
Bacon, Francis.
I’m just trying to make images as accurately as possible off my nervous system as I can.
Bacon, Francis.
Painting is the pattern of one’s own nervous system being projected on canvas.
Bacon, Francis.
I have to hope that my instincts will do the right thing, because I can’t erase what I have done. And if I drew something first, then my paintings would be illustrations of drawings.
Bacon, Francis.
How can I take an interest in my work when I don’t like it?
Bacon, Francis.
I want to make portraits and images. I don’t know how. Out of despair, I just use paint anyway. Suddenly the things you make coagulate and take on just the shape you intend. Totally accurate marks, which are outside representational maks.
Bacon, Francis.
If I didn’t have to live, I’d never let any of it out.
Bacon, Francis.
I don’t believe art is available; it’s rare and curious and should be completely isolated; one is more aware of its magic the more it is isolated.
Bacon, Francis.
Velazquez found the perfect balance between the ideal illustration which he was required to produce, and the overwhelming emotion he aroused in the spectator.
Bacon, Francis.
I use all sorts of things to work with : old brooms, old sweaters, and all kinds of peculiar tools and materials...I paint to excite myself, and make something for myself.
Bacon, Francis.
Some artists leave remarkable thing which, a hundred years later, don’t work at all. I have left my mark; my work is hung in museums, but maybe one day the Tate Gallery or the other museums will banish me to the cellar... you never know.
Bacon, Francis.
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
Bacon, Francis.
The mystery lies in the irrationality by which you make appearance - if it is not irrational, you make illustration.
Bacon, Francis.
I paint for myself. I don’t know how to do anything else, anyway. Also I have to earn my living, and occupy myself.
Bacon, Francis.
Great art is deeply ordered. Even if within the order there may be enormously instinctive and accidental things, nevertheless they come out of a desire for ordering and for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way.
Bacon, Francis.
We only have our nervous system to paint.
Bacon, Francis.
Source: European Graduate School (EGS)
