Francis Bacon Book

Another one in the writers should read aesthetics category, for example, here's one of Deleuze's passages on painting that transfers nicely to writing:

"It is a mistake to think that the painter works on a white surface. The figurative belief follows from this mistake. If the painter were before a white surface, he could reproduce on it an external object functioning as a model, but such is not the case. The painter has many things in his head, or around him, or in his studio. Now everything he has in his head or around him is already on the canvas, more or less virtually, more or less actually, before he begins his work.They are all present in the canvas as so many images, actual or virtual, so that the painter does not have to cover a blank surface but rather would have to empty it out, clear it, clean it. He does not paint in order to reproduce on the canvas an object functioning as a model; he paints images that are already there, in order to produce a canvas whose functioning will reverse relations between model and copy. In short, what we have to define are all these "givens" that are on the canvas before the painters work begins, and determine among these givens, which are obstacles, which are helps, or even the effects of a preparatory work." (71)

So, what's already on your blank page when you sit down to write?

Yes, this book is about Francis Bacon's paintings, and the original French version was a two volume set with the second volume consisting of plates of Bacon's paintings. So for the studying Bacon aspect of reading this book, it really is necessary to have a book with the color plates handy as this volume has none. This book is not exclusively about Bacon's paintings, however; as the quote above reveals, Deleuze is more broadly concerned with art, aesthetics, and philosophy. Whether he's discussing Bacon or the blank page, the logic of sensation or the history of western painting, Deleuze is thought provoking as he, using Bacon as a vehicle, delves into the convergence of art and philosophy that occurred in the twentieth century.