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Perhaps he’s been thinking about our interview, though I’d be surprised if he’s gone to any trouble and I’m beginning to think I’ve got enough for what the magazine needs. Yet he talks quickly and deliberately, as if he had prepared things he wanted to say. I put aside notebook and pencil because I want to engage more fully in the conversation and just hope, since he often repeats and emphasizes things, I’ll be able to recall and note down exactly what he says later.
    â€˜The thing is, Michael,’ Francis remarks diffidently, ‘one can’t really talk about painting, only around it. After all if you could explain it why would you bother to do it?’ He’s brought us both a very strong cup of tea and we sit perched at either end of the soft, squidgy green sofa. ‘Those things are very strange. I’ve no idea how you could present them in a factual way in your interview and yet make them a little bit interesting. That’s what I feel so often in painting. I mean I know exactly what I want to do, but I can’t find the
way
in which this thing can be made. I want a deeply ordered image, you see, but I want it to come about by chance. You always hope that the paint will do more for you, but mostly it’s like painting a wall when the very first brushstroke you do gives a sudden shock of reality that is cancelled out as you paint the whole surface.
    â€˜What one wants in art nowadays is a shorthand where the sensation comes across right away. You have to give things right away, otherwise people can’t be bothered. All you can ever do, obviously, is to work as close to your instinct as possible. WhatI always hope for – this sounds terribly pretentious, perhaps one always sounds pretentious when one’s talking about oneself – is this one absolutely perfect image which will cancel all the others out. Make this thing like an idol which would blink out all kinds of other beautiful images. When I’m away from the studio, abroad for instance, I keep thinking how I might do this thing. I was walking round those formal gardens at Versailles not very long ago and all these images kept simply dropping in to my mind, just like that, one after another, like slides. Well, it’s marvellous when that happens, of course, and I couldn’t wait to get back to London and work.
    â€˜What one longs to do above all, I think, is to reinvent appearance, make it stranger, and more exciting. That’s what’s so extraordinary about Velázquez: he reinvented the very outline of appearance. You only have to look at the way things are in his paintings. He managed to come back to appearance by way of something that lay quite outside the kind of illustration that was expected of him at the time. But it’s a hair’s-breadth thing, particularly nowadays. If you go too far, you just fall into abstraction.
    â€˜You would love somehow to make this marvellous, poignant image and at the same time elevate it on to a kind of stage. So that without using any kind of narrative, you managed to fill it with all sorts of implications. I myself am always looking as I go to and fro every morning in my cage here for ways in which I might make sensation come across with as much immediacy as possible. But this is only something you can do for yourself. I can only paint for myself, to excite myself, you see, and I’m always surprised when other people are interested in it. All painting, well all art, is about sensation. Or at least it should be. After all, life itself is about sensation.’
    Francis produces this last phrase like a rabbit out of a hat which makes me laugh, which in turn seems to please him. He goes padding off in his silent desert boots and comes back with a frosted bottle of Krug and two glasses.
    â€˜Now where shall we have dinner?’ he asks, as if that is a far more important issue than talking about art and life. He seems almost