Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon1998

Francis Bacon:
[to Rawsthorne] It's like the floor in the Japanese pot, that's what makes it so superb. There's no beauty without the wound. Lucifer was the most beautiful angel, that was his fatal flaw. Too much like their creator, darling. I just like to make one picture that would annihilate all the rest. A violent fusion or the past or the present. Concentrated into a single, raw sliced open nerve.

Isabel Rawsthorne:
The portraiture of you're pain.

Francis Bacon:
No. [laughs]

Isabel Rawsthorne:
No. The tenderness is so visible in every brush stroke. The paintings of George are like exquisite love poems. That's the irony of the George pictures. I mean, you seem to put more into the work than into the relationship itself. And ultimately you suffer just as much.