Quotes & Sayings About Francis Bacon Artist

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. — Francis Bacon

Through my friend Tony Shafrazi, who's an art dealer and an artist himself - he helped to show Basquiat and Keith Haring, and has worked with the Francis Bacon estate - it was really through my friendship with Tony that I developed even more of an interest in art. — Owen Wilson

All artists are vain, they long to be recognized and to leave something to posterity. They want to be loved, and at the same time they want to be free. But nobody is free. — Francis Bacon

I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility. — Francis Bacon

An artist must learn to be nourished by his passions and by his despairs, — Francis Bacon

Some artists leave remarkable things which, a 100 years later, don't work at all. I have left my mark; my work is hung in museums, but maybe one day the Tate Gallery or the other museums will banish me to the cellar ... you never know. — Francis Bacon

I don't think people are born artists; I think it comes from a mixture of your surroundings, the people you meet, and luck. — Francis Bacon

Very few people have a natural feeling for painting, and so, of course, they naturally think that painting is an expression of the artist's mood. But it rarely is. Very often he may be in greatest despair and be painting his happiest paintings. — Francis Bacon

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. — Francis Bacon

Gilbert and George said: "But don't you see? That's how Bacon is. He is absolutely right to behave as he wants." Not as he wants. As he has to behave. An artist must be open to the muse. The greater the artist, the more he is open to "cosmic currents." He has to behave as he does. If he has "the courage to be an artist," he is committed to behave as the mood possesses him. "That's the man who booed Princess Margaret!" - the peasantry shrink back from his sulfurous glow. — William S. Burroughs

No artist knows in his own lifetime whether what he does will be the slightest good, because it takes at least seventy-five to a hundred years before the thing begins to sort itself out. — Francis Bacon