I must thank you, Cliff, for my birthday gift.

I think.

David Sylvester’s conversations with Francis Bacon (Thames and Hudson).

I had only read them in part before but today has been both blighted and lighted by them.I have not painted at all. I have read and re-read. His process makes me tingle.

I do not think anyone has ever more eloquently captured, in such an accessible manner, the truth of it (that is).

I offer you this:

“I don’t really know how these particular forms come about. I’m not by that suggesting that I am inspired or gifted. I just don’t know. I look at them – I look at them, probably , from an aesthetic point of view. I know what I want to do, but I don’t know how to do it.. And I look at them like a stranger, not knowing how these things have come about and why have these marks that have happened on the canvas evolved into these particular forms. And then, of course, I remember what I wanted to do and I do, of course, try then and push these irrational forms into what I wanted to do.”

WTF? I so wish he weren’t dead.