Francis Bacon
Quotations

"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery."

 

"Painting is the pattern of one's own nervous system being projected onto the canvas."

 

"Ninety-five percent of people are absolute fools, and they're bigger fools about painting than anything else... Hardly anyone really feels about painting: they read things into it - even the most intelligent people - they think they understand it, but very, very few people are aesthetically touched by painting. "

 

"Since the fact that we exist at all is nothing more than banal, we might just as well make something grand out of it …"

 

"You're not only remaking the look of the image, you're remaking all the areas of feeling which you yourself have apprehensions of."

 

"I don't think one can explain it...if you could explain your painting, you would be explaining your instincts."

 

"One wants a thing to be as factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation."

 

"You know in my case all painting-and the older I get the more it becomes so-is an accident. I foresee it, yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint."

 

"I would like, in my arbitrary way, to bring one nearer to the actual human being."

 

"Ideas always acquire appearance veils, the attitudes that people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils. "

 

"As the births of living creatures, at first, are ill-shapen: so are all Innovations, which are the births of time. "

 

"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. "

 

"Everybody has his own interpretation of a painting he sees... "

 

"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. "

 

"If I didn’t have to live, I’d never let any of it out."