Francis Bacon (artist) Quotes

24 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Francis Bacon
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
Painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down.

Francis Bacon
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
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
I think I tend to destroy the better paintings, or those that have been better to a certain extent. I try and take them further, and they lose all their qualities, and they lose everything. I think I would say that I destroy all the better paintings.

Francis Bacon
I like, you may say, the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth, and I've always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset.

Francis Bacon
Photographs are not only points of reference... they're often triggers of ideas.

Francis Bacon
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
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
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
I think there is a difficult moment in the life of a man. The moment when he discovers that youth is not eternal. On this day I realized this. I thought about death and since then, I think about death every day.

Francis Bacon
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
Jackson Pollock's paintings might be very pretty but they're just decoration. I always think they look like old lace.

Francis Bacon
For a painter, moments of sexual fantasy can lead to paintings that are often very banal, and when the arousal fades, you realize that it hasn't done anything. It's like drugs. When you are on a high, the result of your work is rarely something of quality: too many things are exterior. And too many exterior things have disrupted your nervous system, and the result is often disappointing.

Francis Bacon
Painting is very physical as it is, painting scenes of men in action gives me a great pleasure. It's one of the aspects of human behavior that most interests me. It's instinct, and it's my instinct to paint it.

Francis Bacon
[My parents] were horrified at the thought that I might want to be an artist.

Francis Bacon
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, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils

Francis Bacon
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.

Francis Bacon
When I think of my childhood, I see something very heavy, very cold, like a block of ice. I think I was unhappy as a child. I only ever had one view: that of emerging from it.

Francis Bacon
What I see is a marvellous painting. But how are you going to make it? And, of course, as I don't know how to make it, I rely then on chance and accident making it for me.

Francis Bacon
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

Francis Bacon
Champagne for my real friends, and real pain for my sham friends.
His favorite toast

Francis Bacon