Francis Bacon Quotes About Painting
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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.
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It's always hopeless to talk about painting - one never does anything but talk around it.
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I paint for myself. I don't know how to do anything else, anyway. Also I have to earn my living, and occupy myself.
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Painting is the pattern of one's own nervous system being projected on canvas.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down.
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Everybody has his own interpretation of a painting he sees.
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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.
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Before I start painting I have a slightly ambiguous feeling: happiness is a special excitement because unhappiness is always possible a moment later.
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When I paint I am ageless, I just have the pleasure or the difficulty of painting.
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We only have our nervous system to paint.
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Painting gave meaning to my life which without it would not have had
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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.
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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.
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My painting is not violent, it's life that is violent. Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves, the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life. We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death.
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If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently.
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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.
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Francis Bacon
- Born: January 22, 1561
- Died: April 9, 1626
- Occupation: Former Lord Chancellor
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