Francis Bacon Art Quotations

Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Art is man added to Nature.

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, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils

Painting gave meaning to my life which without it would not have had

The nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom.

Many secrets of art and nature are thought by the unlearned to be magical.

Great art is deeply ordered. Even if within the order there may be enormously instinctive and accidental things, nevertheless they come out of a desire for ordering and for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way.

All authority must be out of a man's self, turned . . . either upon an art, or upon a man.

Men are rather beholden ... generally to chance or anything else, than to logic, for the invention of arts and sciences.

I paint for myself. I don't know how to do anything else, anyway. Also I have to earn my living, and occupy myself.

Excusations, cessions, modesty itself well governed, are but arts of ostentation.

I don't believe art is available; it's rare and curious and should be completely isolated; one is more aware of its magic the more it is isolated.

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.

Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint.

They are the best physicians, who being great in learning most incline to the traditions of experience, or being distinguished in practice do not reflect the methods and generalities of art.

I think that one of the things is that, if you are going to decide to be a painter, you have got to decide that you are not going to be afraid of making a fool of yourself. I think another thing is to be able to find subjects which really absorb you to try and do. I feel that without a subject you automatically go back into decoration because you haven't got the subject which is always eating into you to bring it back - and the greatest art always returns you to the vulnerability of the human situation.