You don’t know how the hopelessness in one’s work will make you just take the paint and do almost anything to get out of the formula of making a kind of illustration. I mean I just wipe it all over with a rag or use a brush or rub it with something or anything or throw turpentine or paint and everything else into the thing to try and break the willed articulation of the image so that the image will grow, as it were, spontaneously and within its own structure, and not by my structure. Afterwards your sense of what you want comes into play–so that you begin to work on the hazard that has been left to you/and out of all that/ possibly, a more organic image arises than if it was a willed image / Francis Bacon 7 Reece Mews, Lon. S.W.7 (inscribed by Peter Beard, top edge)