art is

the english painter francis bacon would not explain, what his paintings were about. he believed that any explanation would destroy the power and magic of the image, because in the pure painting process he liked chance and accident to drive the image out of the fog and the chaos of the experience. how can you describe an event that arrives from the chaos and beauty of the creative process. a process that is done alone with no audience, and wordless. in his later years after he was famous, he became a great talker, he'd done so many paintings perhaps he felt safe that his greatness, and the magic of making those fabulous, distorted, powerful modern images were safe in his genius. yet the world demands explanations, art becomes a commodity, ultimately to be sold to wealthy people, it must be understood to be sold, and the greater the mystery to be solved the more something must be explained, yet i have found that the people who bought my paintings needed very little explanation and most often did not need to know from me what a piece meant and in most cases didn't need to hear anything from me. the painting struck something in them, perhaps what i saw in it, mostly likely not and that to me adds to the great mystery of the whole art making art, buying process. people respond or they don't, the world and i think bacon is great, but julie doesn't like him at all, so dark, to sinster, the images twisted and forcibly disfigured, yet i see an artist blazing a path no one had ever ventured. the push and pull of making art, the unknown aaccidental stroke that leads to the finish of the painting and never knowing when that will come is part of the great wonderful experience of making art. i never want to know very much before i start, arriving in front of the canvas is quite enough. jgk