Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work, is what makes all the difference in art. The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

Bacon contrasts mere technique with “conception”—the originating, structuring act of imagination and thought that gives an artwork its necessity. By calling it “fundamental brain work,” he insists that painting is not simply expressive spontaneity but an intellectual struggle to find an image-form adequate to sensation. The second sentence frames art’s purpose as intensification rather than explanation: the artist should not resolve ambiguity into clear messages, but make experience feel more profound, strange, and inexhaustible. In Bacon’s terms, successful art heightens the viewer’s encounter with reality by making it more enigmatic and emotionally charged, resisting easy narrative or illustrative closure.