Francis Bacon Quotes

If you can talk about it, why paint it?
-Francis Bacon

I enjoy life but I have absolutely no belief In anything, I don't say that anguish doesn't play a part in my work. The very fact that you exist, that you see what's going on around you, that must create anguish in anybody. I have a feeling of mortality all the time because if life excites you, its opposite, death, like a shadow, must excite you.
-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 that fact acquires through time. Ideas always acquire appearance veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils.
-Francis Bacon

It's always hopeless talking about painting - one never does anything but talk around it - because, if you could explain you painting, you would be explaining you instincts.
-Francis Bacon

Everybody has his own interpretation of a painting he sees. I don't mind if people have different interpretations of what I have painted ... A picture should be a re-creation of an event rather than an illustration of an object; but there is no tension in the picture unless there is the struggle with the object.
-Francis Bacon

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.
-Francis Bacon

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... There's never any tension in it. -Francis Bacon The moment there are several figures - at any rate several figures on the same canvas - the story begins to be elaborated. And the moment the story is elaborated, the boredom sets in; the story talks louder than the paint... I don't want to avoid telling a story, but I want very, very much to do the thing that Valéry said - to give the sensation without the boredom of it's conveyance. And the moment the story enters, the boredom comes upon you.
-Francis Bacon