About seven years ago I went back to school to study fine art as a postgraduate student and this is when I fell in love with Cy Twombly. Amongst the people I know there are mixed feelings about his work. Some feel it’s too childlike, that it’s just scribbles and dribbles and scratches. Others have read Roland Barthes and been converted. Perhaps they have been genuinely converted, have found something different in his work after reading Barthes, or perhaps they feel that the seriousness with which he examines the work gives it its substance. And then there are others, like me, who love his paintings and drawings because they give you that sensation; of facing something special – a communication of something; a confrontation with the workings out of a complex problem. It gives me a feeling inside that I don’t get very often – sometimes in the past I have experienced it reading Hardy, Nabokov or Orwell but that was when I was younger and more easily moved – it rarely happens now. I have felt it in front of a painting by Callum Innes, and when I discovered the Dutch artist Mark Manders.
You can get lost in Twombly’s workings out, his marks, his words, his pencil lines. Sometimes he seems to shout out from the canvas in a jarring and discordant way as though he’s trying to wake you or communicate something that you haven’t paid attention to. And he does this with words that are ambiguous, leaving you to make your own interpretation.
In my own prints and drawings I try for that sense of the discordant. There is something refreshing about unexpected trails, lines that disappear behind washes of paint. It’s an antidote to the routines of life, to the boredom of repetition and feels like a splash of cold on a stifling hot day.
somethingsinbetween 