#30×30 Day 26 : Francis Bacon, on Art

“In my case all painting… is an accident. 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.”

“Some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tell you the story in a long diatribe through the brain.”

“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.”

“How can I take an interest in my work when I don’t like it?”

“I want to make portraits and images. I don’t know how. Out of despair, I just use paint anyway. Suddenly the things you make coagulate and take on just the shape you intend. Totally accurate marks, which are outside representational marks.”

“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”

“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.”

~ Francis Bacon, Oct 1909 – April 1992