British Painter Quotes

Francis Bacon (artist)

Lucian Freud

Ben Nicholson

John Berger

Wyndham Lewis

David Bomberg

Almost anything that can be praised or advocated has been put to some disgusting use. There is no principle, however immaculate, that has not had its compromising manipulator.

Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.

I work from the people that interest me, and that I care about, in rooms that I live in and know. I use the people to invent my pictures, and I can work more freely when they are there.

It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly.

It's such an extraordinary supple medium that you never do quite know what paint will do.

Francis Bacon (artist)

Good judgement is through good drawing – from the nervous system to the sensory of the brain it is the combination of eurythmics, euphony and poetry, and when the good draughtsman draws, the muses come to dance. Then the imagination is given full play, and design happens. They then become the Muses.

There are places, just as there are people and objects... whose relationship of parts creates a mystery.

Realism' has been abandoned in the search for reality: the 'principal objective' of abstract art is precisely this reality.