TJAMES

Heroic and Painterly: an Artist's Thoughts on Cy Twombly

Terrell James, Houston Chronicle, May 27, 2005

From time to time, which is to say since the cave painters of 20,000 years ago, an artist emerges whose talents and ambitions claim as their scope the entire history of image-making and representation. Cy Twombly is just such an artist, and if there is controversy about his work, it focuses not on his undeniable mastery of canvas, paint, pencil and brush, but on whether his ambitions and the work itself measure up to that scope.

These are big questions, which require a careful consideration of the work. As a painter, I look first at a painting as painting, a way of making marks and meaning on a (usually) flat, prepared surface. In Twombly's works, I see a broad variety of gestures and marks, sensual traces, deliberate references and incidental meanings. I also see inconsistencies, fragments, suggestions of stories and great, great beauty. The first of his works that I came to love are the open linen drawings and/or paintings (it's sometimes hard to define a difference) from the late forties and the fifties. The sense of the brush leading the mind, rather than the opposite, made his work seem the outpouring of an entire existence, rather than the judgments produced of a limited rationality.

From it, as I was still very young in my own work, I gained permission for a greater immediacy and openness, and the courage to follow my brush where it led, rather than trying to figure it all out in advance.

In contrast to the globe-spanning ambitions claimed by the earlier Abstract Expressionists, Twombly posed another kind of heroism - a painterly, personal, intimate involvement with the materials of art making. With him, lines could be just scrawlings and still be art; a canvas could be as provisional as a chalkboard, yet still be a field for deep explorations of feeling, form and color. This, for me, felt like freedom the freedom to invent my paintings as they were painted, to find narratives in my vision itself.

In its time, this sensibility (shared by Rauschenberg and Johns), brought much change to art and how we think about it. However, there is more to Twombly than simply a new rendition of the artists one-on-one encounters with his or her media and with the viewer. As we commonly see universals in the immediate, so Twombly's work often suggests larger meanings for his local, particular gestures. Do they reach back, as his titles often suggest, to an authentic, classical awareness? Has he found a crypto-classical existence within the shell of our modernity? Is such an embodiment even possible? The answers can only be based on ones sense of the work's authenticity, a judgement that depends on the authenticity of one's own awareness and encounter with it.

And so, I return to the paintings, the drawings, the sculptures, with their evocations of feelings both personal and universal, and their resonance with music, poetry and automatic writing. Spaces in the canvases are often both full and empty. What may strike the viewer first is an absence, the generous amount of unfilled surface; the space around the marks becomes an important subject in the work, not merely a backdrop for narrative drama.

But if one is quiet with the pieces, the sometimes meager (or the lean and fat, smeary, body fluid washy) marks, in modest material, (ballpoint pen, colored pencil, house paint) can change character. A volume of connections, of webs, of musical scores, emerges.

Then, for me at least, can come a wonderful, perplexing tipping of perception. I am talking about a perceptible shift along the threads of connections between that vast space of thoughts and associations behind the marks, and the marks or drawing/painting areas themselves. It's a movement that sometimes can seem to crackle with electricity, but which sometimes can have a feeling of stillness and contemplation.

Of all of his work in different media, the works on paper most reveal the immediacy of Twomblys process. They seem to be made of the energy of attention itself, as much as of paper, pencil, crayon and brush, connecting and not connecting, always moving. The drawings and collages explode with readable things nouns, like breasts, holes and ships, petals and bullets; verbs, like slash, float, wash, transport, console, implode. And the hand seems always present, always there, an aspect of Twombly's work I most enjoy. There is often a palpable sense of touch, pressure, speed and thought. By that I mean free in form and color, undetermined by premeditated gesture. He says that he always starts a piece with a particular idea in mind, but that the work goes somewhere else. This sense of uncovering, of taking dictation (rather than giving it), from both his own deep experience, and from the nonverbal turf that lies below or behind experience. Scrawling the names of ancient battles and places, heroes and poets, Twombly does more than translate meaning from word to painting, one form to another. I feel he incorporates the event, gives it life, as evidenced by the vitality of each small mark as it contributes to the whole. Alone in his studio, he seems imaginatively to relive these pasts in some way, personally. In experiencing the work, we can join him in this return, and may thereby discover the resonance of ancient worlds in our own existence.

Paradoxically the inscriptions and titles pointing to ancient history open up a huge scope for work that is so resolutely based on the personal and intimate. Yet it is true that, for the ancients as well as for us, life is lived moment by moment, witnessed through the particular prisms of our sensibilities.

Twombly poses the intriguing possibility that he has located within himself true echoes of ancient sensibilities, and that, like a shaman, he can make them available for us to experience. Since to experience a sensibility is also to embody its view, this is a promise of connection to the person-hood of the ancients, their poetry of existence, from which we seem otherwise insulated not only by the millenia of history, but by our presumptions of modernity.

-- Terrell James

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	*Heroic and Painterly: an Artist's Thoughts on Cy Twombly* Terrell James, Houston Chronicle, May 27, 2005 From time to time, which is to say since the cave painters of 20,000 years ago, an artist emerges whose talents and ambitions claim as their scope the entire history of image-making and representation. Cy Twombly is just such an artist, and if there is controversy about his work, it focuses not on his undeniable mastery of canvas, paint, pencil and brush, but on whether his ambitions and the work itself measure up to that scope. These are big questions, which require a careful consideration of the work. As a painter, I look first at a painting as painting, a way of making marks and meaning on a (usually) flat, prepared surface. In Twombly's works, I see a broad variety of gestures and marks, sensual traces, deliberate references and incidental meanings. I also see inconsistencies, fragments, suggestions of stories and great, great beauty. The first of his works that I came to love are the open linen drawings and/or paintings (it's sometimes hard to define a difference) from the late forties and the fifties. The sense of the brush leading the mind, rather than the opposite, made his work seem the outpouring of an entire existence, rather than the judgments produced of a limited rationality. From it, as I was still very young in my own work, I gained permission for a greater immediacy and openness, and the courage to follow my brush where it led, rather than trying to figure it all out in advance. In contrast to the globe-spanning ambitions claimed by the earlier Abstract Expressionists, Twombly posed another kind of heroism - a painterly, personal, intimate involvement with the materials of art making. With him, lines could be just scrawlings and still be art; a canvas could be as provisional as a chalkboard, yet still be a field for deep explorations of feeling, form and color. This, for me, felt like freedom the freedom to invent my paintings as they were painted, to find narratives in my vision itself. In its time, this sensibility (shared by Rauschenberg and Johns), brought much change to art and how we think about it. However, there is more to Twombly than simply a new rendition of the artists one-on-one encounters with his or her media and with the viewer. As we commonly see universals in the immediate, so Twombly's work often suggests larger meanings for his local, particular gestures. Do they reach back, as his titles often suggest, to an authentic, classical awareness? Has he found a crypto-classical existence within the shell of our modernity? Is such an embodiment even possible? The answers can only be based on ones sense of the work's authenticity, a judgement that depends on the authenticity of one's own awareness and encounter with it. And so, I return to the paintings, the drawings, the sculptures, with their evocations of feelings both personal and universal, and their resonance with music, poetry and automatic writing. Spaces in the canvases are often both full and empty. What may strike the viewer first is an absence, the generous amount of unfilled surface; the space around the marks becomes an important subject in the work, not merely a backdrop for narrative drama. But if one is quiet with the pieces, the sometimes meager (or the lean and fat, smeary, body fluid washy) marks, in modest material, (ballpoint pen, colored pencil, house paint) can change character. A volume of connections, of webs, of musical scores, emerges. Then, for me at least, can come a wonderful, perplexing tipping of perception. I am talking about a perceptible shift along the threads of connections between that vast space of thoughts and associations behind the marks, and the marks or drawing/painting areas themselves. It's a movement that sometimes can seem to crackle with electricity, but which sometimes can have a feeling of stillness and contemplation. Of all of his work in different media, the works on paper most reveal the immediacy of Twomblys process. They seem to be made of the energy of attention itself, as much as of paper, pencil, crayon and brush, connecting and not connecting, always moving. The drawings and collages explode with readable things nouns, like breasts, holes and ships, petals and bullets; verbs, like slash, float, wash, transport, console, implode. And the hand seems always present, always there, an aspect of Twombly's work I most enjoy. There is often a palpable sense of touch, pressure, speed and thought. By that I mean free in form and color, undetermined by premeditated gesture. He says that he always starts a piece with a particular idea in mind, but that the work goes somewhere else. This sense of uncovering, of taking dictation (rather than giving it), from both his own deep experience, and from the nonverbal turf that lies below or behind experience. Scrawling the names of ancient battles and places, heroes and poets, Twombly does more than translate meaning from word to painting, one form to another. I feel he incorporates the event, gives it life, as evidenced by the vitality of each small mark as it contributes to the whole. Alone in his studio, he seems imaginatively to relive these pasts in some way, personally. In experiencing the work, we can join him in this return, and may thereby discover the resonance of ancient worlds in our own existence. Paradoxically the inscriptions and titles pointing to ancient history open up a huge scope for work that is so resolutely based on the personal and intimate. Yet it is true that, for the ancients as well as for us, life is lived moment by moment, witnessed through the particular prisms of our sensibilities. Twombly poses the intriguing possibility that he has located within himself true echoes of ancient sensibilities, and that, like a shaman, he can make them available for us to experience. Since to experience a sensibility is also to embody its view, this is a promise of connection to the person-hood of the ancients, their poetry of existence, from which we seem otherwise insulated not only by the millenia of history, but by our presumptions of modernity. -- Terrell James