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Francis Bacon - From the Abstraction category:
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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Accidents category:
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. I don't 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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Accidents category:
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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Accidents category:
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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Accidents category:
I want a very ordered image, but I want it to come about by chance. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Art category:
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 artist, because he must really deepen the game to become any good at all. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Chaos category:
I believe in deeply ordered chaos. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Colour category:
All colours will agree in the dark. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Communication category:
Some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Communication category:
If you can talk about it, why paint it? (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Communication category:
It's always hopeless to talk about painting – one never does anything but talk around it. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Communication category:
I would like my pictures 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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Concentration category:
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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Contemporary Art category:
Painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Creativity category:
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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Deception category:
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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Desperation category:
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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Dreams category:
If I sit and daydream, the images rush by like a succession of colored slides. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Emotion category:
All of our actions take their hue from the complexion of the heart, as landscapes their variety from light. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Emotion category:
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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Emotion category:
Before I start painting I have a slightly ambiguous feeling: happiness is a special excitement because unhappiness is always possible a moment later. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Fear category:
It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Form category:
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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Grace category:
A graceful and pleasing figure is a perpetual letter of recommendation. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Humanity category:
I would like, in my arbitrary way, to bring one nearer to the actual human being. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Ideas category:
Ideas always acquire appearance veils, the attitudes that people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Ideas category:
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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Inspiration category:
You could say that I have no inspiration, that I only need to paint. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Instinct category:
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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Interest category:
How can I take an interest in my work when I don't like it? (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Interpretation category:
Everybody has his own interpretation of a painting he sees... (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Knowledge category:
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 marks. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Life category:
If I didn't have to live, I'd never let any of it out. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Magic category:
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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Masters category:
Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Masters category:
Velazquez found the perfect balance between the ideal illustration which he was required to produce, and the overwhelming emotion he aroused in the spectator. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Materials category:
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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Meaning category:
Painting gave meaning to my life, which without it, it would not have had. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Museums category:
Some artists leave remarkable things which, a 100 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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Mysteries category:
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Mysteries category:
The mystery lies in the irrationality by which you make appearance – if it is not irrational, you make illustration. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Order category:
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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Painting category:
We only have our nervous system to paint. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Painting category:
I paint for myself. I don't know how to do anything else, anyway. Also I have to earn my living, and occupy myself. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Pattern category:
Painting is the pattern of one's own nervous system being projected on canvas. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Perfection category:
I'm just trying to make images as accurately as possible off my nervous system as I can. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Photography category:
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... (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Portraiture category:
I loathe my own face, and I've done self-portraits because I've had nobody else to do. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Portraiture category:
If my people look as if they're in a dreadful fix, it's because I can't get them out of a technical dilemma. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Recognition category:
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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Struggle category:
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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Subject category:
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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Time category:
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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Vanity category:
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. (Francis Bacon)
Francis Bacon - From the Work category:
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 the excitement and possibilities are in the working and obviously can only come in the working. (Francis Bacon)
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