Michael Peppiatt > Quotes

“Bacon loved the extremes of waking in the grim discomfort of his living quarters and working in the studio’s cramped chaos before appearing for dinner, impeccably groomed, in the hushed opulence of a grand hotel.”
― Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma

“desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.”
― Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma

“While he dropped fortunes at roulette and insisted on his guests having the best view and every delicacy in restaurants, he himself would often walk home or take the Underground rather than choose the comfort of a cab.”
― Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma

“Because abstraction can never convey fact in a precise way. It can't be made to convey anything precisely.”
― Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in Your Blood

“That's what I feel so often in painting. I mean I know exactly what I want to do, but I can't find the way in which this thing can be made. I want a deeply ordered image, you see, but I want it to come about by chance. You can always hope that the paint will do more for you, but mostly it's like painting a wall when the very first brushstroke you do gives a sudden shock of reality that is cancelled out as you paint the whole surface.”
― Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in Your Blood

“he was alluding to what he considered the most insidious punishment of all: guilt,”
― Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma

“It’s tragic to go on desiring when one’s old.’ There were also the haunting possibilities of promises not fulfilled.”
― Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma

“What one longs to do above all, I think, is to reinvent appearances, make it stranger, and more exciting. That's what's so extraordinary about Velazquez: he reinvented the very outline of appearance. You only have to look at the way things are in his paintings. He managed to come back to appearance by way of something that lay quite outside the kind of illustration that was expected of him at the time.”
― Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in Your Blood