2. Francis Bacon
• Irish born British painter (28 October 1909 – 28
April 1992)
• figurative painter known for his bold, austere,
graphic and emotionally raw imagery
• Many of Bacon's paintings depict isolated figures,
often framed by geometric constructions, and
rendered in smeared, violent colours
• His paintings often suggest anger, horror, and
degradation
3.
4. What is the motivation for your work?
• I paint to excite myself, and make something
for myself.
5. It is said you use photographs and
imagery as sources for your
works, how does this influence what
you do?
• Images help me find and realize ideas. I look at
hundreds of very different, contrasting images
and I pinch details from them, rather like
people who eat from other people's plates.
6. So you could say in a sense you are like
a magpie?
• Yes you could say that. My work becomes a
chain of ideas created by the many images
that I look at and which I have
registered, often on contrasting subjects.
7. What generates your defaced,
distorted figures and imagery?
• This defacing, came out of desire to paint
toward an image. I deformed and reformed
the human body because modern society
wants a sensation without conveyance.
9. Aside from brushes and paints, do you
use any other instruments or methods
in your work?
• I use all sorts of things to work with: old
brooms, old sweaters, and all kinds of
peculiar tools and materials...
10. Do you sketch out your pictures before
you paint?
• No I never work from a sketch, I just apply paint
straight onto un-primed canvas. I like the way the
paint soaks into the material, making it impossible to
erase once applied. This a method I have stuck with.
Study for a Portrait' 1953
11. Do you anticipate how you want your
image to look before you paint?
• I want a very ordered image, but I want it to
come about by chance
In Memory of George Dyer 1971
12. So you don’t really plan a painting?
• 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.
13. Can you give an example of how this
comes about in your work?
• Well, one of the pictures I did in 1946, the one
like a butcher's shop, came to me as an accident.
I was attempting to make a bird alighting on a
field. And it may have been bound up in some
way with the three forms that had gone
before, but suddenly the lines that I'd drawn
suggested something totally different, and out of
this suggestion arouse this picture. I had no
intention to do this picture; I never thought of it
in that way. It was like one continuous accident
mounting on top of another.
15. So your paintings come about
organically?
• 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.
Triptych 1972
17. Can you say what impelled you to do your perhaps
most famous Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion?
I've always been very moved by pictures about
slaughterhouses and meat, and to me they
belong very much to the whole thing of the
crucifixion. It appears by these photographs that
they are aware of what is going to happen to
them, they do everything to attempt to escape. I
think these pictures were very much based on
that kind of thing, which to me is very near this
whole thing of the crucifixion.
18. In painting this Crucifixion, did you have the three canvases up
simultaneously, or did you work on them quite separately?
I worked on them separately, and gradually, as I
finished them, I worked on the three across
the room together. I did in about a
fortnight, when I was in a bad mood of
drinking, and I did it under tremendous
hangovers and drink; I sometimes hardly knew
what I was doing. And it's one of the only
pictures that I've been able to do under drink.
I think perhaps the drink helped me to be a bit
freer.
20. Is there any particular way in you like your work to be
looked at, or remembered if you like?
I would like my pictures to look as if a
human being had passed between
them, like a snail leaving its trail of the
human presence... as a snail leaves its
slime.
