Francis Bacon

 Head II, 1949

"One is attempting, of course, to keep the vitality of the accident and yet preserve a continuity."

"It's a very, very close and difficult thing to know why some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain."

"...the story that is already being told between one figure and another begins to cancel out the possibilities of what can be done with the paint on its own."

"...when you were sitting for portrait I was trying to do of you, I was always looking at photographs of wild animals. . . .Well, one image can be deeply suggestive in relation to another. I had an idea in those days that textures should be very much thicker, and therefore the texture of, for instance a rhinoceros skin would help me to think about the texture of the human skin."

"One of the things about the Crucifixion is the very fact that the central figure of Christ is raised into a very pronounced and isolated position, which gives it, from a formal point of view, greater possibilities than having all the different figures placed on the same level. The alteration of level is, from my point of view, very important."

"I think that accident, which I would call luck, is one of the most important and fertile aspects of it, because, if anything works for me, I feel it is nothing I have made myself, but something which chance has been able to give me. But its true to say that over a great many years I have been thinking about chance and about the possibilities of using what chance can give, and I never know how much is pure chance and how much it is manipulation of it."

"I want a very ordered image but I want it to come about by chance."

"I think the texture of a painting seems to be more immediate than the texture of a photograph, because the texture of a photograph seems to go through an illustrational process onto the nervous system, whereas the texture of a painting seems to come immediately onto the nervous system."

"...I think that the potency of the image is created partly by the possibility of its enduring. And, of course images accumulate sensation around themselves the longer they endure."

"I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks. And you can't will this non-rationality of a mark. That is the reason that accident always has to enter into this activity, because the moment you know what to do, you're making just another form of illustration. But what can happen sometimes, as it happened in this Rembrandt self-portrait, is that there is a coagulation of non-representational marks which have led to making up this very great image."

"One of the reasons why I don't like abstract painting, or why it doesn't interest me, is that I think painting is a duality and that abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on one level. It is only really interested in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes. We know that most people, especially artists, have large areas of undisciplined emotion, and I think that abstract artists believe that in these marks that they're making they are catching all these sorts of emotions. But I think that, caught in that way, they are too weak to convey anything. I think that great art is deeply ordered. Even if within the order there may be enormously instinctive and accidental things, nevertheless I think that they come out of a desire for ordering and for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way. Why, after the great artists, do people ever try to do anything again? Only because, from generation to generation, through what the great artists have done, the instincts change. And, as the instincts change, so there comes a renewal of the feeling of how can I remake this thing once again more clearly, more exactly, more violently. You see, I believe that art is recording; I think it's reporting. And I think that in abstract art, as there's no report, there's nothing other than the aesthetic of the painter and his few sensations. There's never any tension in it."

"What you're talking about now is the entry of the spectator into the performance, and I think in abstract art perhaps they can enter more, because what they are offered is something weaker which they haven't got to combat."

"I think that art is an obsession with life and after all, as we are human beings, our greatest obsession is with ourselves. Then possibly with animals, and then with landscapes."

"I would loathe my paintings to look like chancy abstract expressionist paintings, because I really like highly disciplines painting, although I don't use highly disciplined methods of constructing it. I think the only thing is that my paint looks immediate. Perhaps it's a vanity to say that, but at least I sometimes think, in the better things, the paint has an immediacy, although I don't think it looks like thrown about paint."

"It's also always hopeless talking about painting - one never does anything but talk around it - because, if you could explain your painting, you would be explaining instinct."

"...in spite of theoretically longing for the image to be made up of irrational marks, inevitably illustration has to come into it to make certain parts of the head and face which, if one left them out, one would only be making abstract design. I think what I very often have talked about has been perhaps a particular theory of mine which is impossible to achieve."



-Francis Bacon