Why it’s always hopeless to talk about painting

I recently read the conversations between Francis Bacon and Frank Maubert.

Great book, short, but filled with honesty and remarkable thoughts on art and life itself.

Highly recommended for people interested in the irish painter.

You can see an honest Francis speaking freely between glasses of wine.

In some of the conversations he says something I have been thinking about for years,

"Why talk about painting? "

(It’s funny because he loved talking about it, but I get what he meant)

I could be talking for hours about a painting,

there’s a pleasure in it, but deep inside I know that it is nonsense.

As he said,

"It’s always hopeless to talk about painting - one never does anything but talk around it"

The painting was created to express something you had no words for.

We usually ask for the meaning behind a painting, something we rarely do for a musical piece,

I think we are missing the point, we are spending too much energy in understanding.

Instead we could just feel.

Because in the end,

"If you can talk about it, why paint it? "