Francis Bacon

Art is a method of opening up areas of feeling rather than merely an illustration of an object . . . A picture should be a recreation 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.

I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events as the snail leaves its slime.

One thing that has never been really worked out is how photography has completely altered figurative painting. I think Velásquez believed that he was recording the court at that time and 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 particular thing could be recorded on film; so this side of his activity has been taken over by something else.

Also 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 Velásquez was painting, even when Rembrandt was painting, they were still, whatever their attitude to life, slightly conditioned by certain types of religious possibilities, which man now, you could say, has had canceled out for him. Man now can only attempt to beguile himself, for a time, by prolonging his life--by buying a kind of immortality through the doctors. You see, painting has become, all art has become a game by which man distracts himself. And you may say it has always been like that, but now it's entirely a game. What is fascinating is that it's going to become much more difficult for the artist, because he musts really deepen the game to be any good at all, that he can make life a bit more exciting.

In my case all painting--and the older I get, the more it becomes so--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 that are very much better than I could make it do. Perhaps one could say it's not an accident, because it becomes a selective process what part of the accident one chooses to preserve.