GUIDE TO LIFE ARCHIVE GUIDE TO LIFE ⇒

These are quotes I typed up from the book of interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester.
As with the Bauhaus Notes I should re-read and edit this text to see what still interests me, but until that happens, the Sub-Archive is a good place for it to be.

The will to make oneself completely free. Will is the wrong word, because in the end you could call it despair. Because it really comes out of an absolute feeling of it’s impossible to do these things, so I might as well just do anything. And out of this anything, one sees what happens.

Can you analyse the difference, in fact, between paint which conveys directly and paint which conveys through illustration? This is a very, very difficult problem to put into words. It is something to do with instinct. It’s a very, very close and difficult thing to know why some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain.

Have you any positive urge to show them to people? Would it matter to you if they wer never seen?
It wouldn't. No. Of course it’s true there are a very, very few people who could help me by their criticism, and I would be very pleased if they liked them at all. But otherwise I don't really care much.

In the complicated stage in which painting is now, 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. This is because we are actually in very primitive times once again, and we haven’t been able to cancel out the story- telling between one image and another.

I think that Velasquez believed that he was recording the court at that time and recording certain people at that time; but a really good artist today would be forced to make a game of the same situation. He knows that the recording can be done by film, so that side of his activity has been taken over by something else and all that he is involved with is making the sensibility open up through the image. Also, I think that man now realizes that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason. I think that, even when Velasquez was painting, even when Rembrandt was painting, in a peculiar way they were still, whatever their attitude to life, slightly conditioned by certain types of religious possibilities, which man now, you could say, has had completely cancelled out for him. Now, of course, man can only attempt to make something very, very positive by trying to beguile himself for a time by the way he behaves …. You see, all art has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself; and you may say it has always been like that, but now it’s entirely a game. And I think that that is the way things have changed, and what is fascinating now is that it’s going to become much more difficult for the artist, because he must really deepen the game to be any good at all.

I think it’s the slight remove from fact, which returns me onto the fact more violently. Through the photographic image I find myself beginning to wander into the image and unlock what I think of as its reality more than I can by looking at it.

But tell me, who today has been able to record anything that comes across to us as a fact without causing deep injury to the image?

But when you’re outside a tradition, as every artist is today, one can only want to record one’s own feelings about certain situations as closely to one’s own nervous system as one possibly can.

I want a very ordered image but I want it to come about by chance…I would like things to come easily, but you can’t order chance. This is the thing. Because if you could, you would only be imposing another type of illustration.

I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks. And you can’t will this non-rationality of a mark. That is the reason that accident always has to enter into this activity, because the moment you know what to do, you’re making just another form of illustration.

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. It always remains on one level. It is only really interested in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes. We know that most people, especially artists, have large areas of undisciplined emotion, and I think that abstract artists believe that in these marks that they’re making they are catching all these sorts of emotions. But I think that, caught in that way, they are too weak to convey anything. 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… you see I believe that art is recording; I think it’s reporting. And I think that in abstract art, as there’s no report, there’s nothing other that the aesthetic of the painter and his few sensations. There’s never any tension in it…I think that it can convey very watered-down lyrical feelings, because I think any shapes can. But I don’t think it can really convey feeling in the grand sense.

I don’t want to avoid telling a story, but I want very, very much … to give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. And the moment the story enters, the boredom comes upon you.

…it seems that the obsession with something in life that you want to record gives a much greater tension and a much greater excitement than when you’ve simply said you’ll just go on in a free-fancy way and record the shapes and the colours…Because with these marvellous mechanical means of recording fact, what can you do but go to a very much more extreme thing where you are reporting fact not as simple fact but on many levels, where you unlock the areas of feeling which lead to a deeper sense of the reality of the image…