Tim Marlow TV - Katharina Schmidt - Kirk Varnedoe - Cy Twombly -
Cy Twombly: Quattro Stagioni (A Painting in Four Parts) 1993-4: Twombly is an artist who clearly ... has come through surrealist automatic writing and doodling. But he is also the product of an American art form which he reacts against called Abstract Expressionism. Tim Marlow on ... The New Tate Modern
Cy Twombly’s work can be understood as one vast engagement with cultural memory. His paintings, drawings and sculptures on mythological subjects have come to form a significant part of that memory. Usually drawing on the most familiar gods and heroes, he restricts himself to just a few, relatively well-known episodes, as narrated by poet-historians, given visible shape by artists and repeatedly reinterpreted in the literature and visual art of later centuries ... His special medium is writing. Starting out from purely graphic marks, he developed a kind of meta-script in which abbreviated signs, hatchings, loops, numbers and the simplest of pictographs spread throughout the picture plane in a process of incessant movement, repeatedly subverted by erasures. Eventually, this metamorphosed into script itself. Katharina Schmidt, essay ‘Immortal and Eternally Young’
One could say that any child could make a drawing like Twombly only in the sense that any fool with a hammer could fragment sculptures as Rodin did, or any house painter could spatter paint as well as Pollock. In none of these cases would it be true. In each case the art lies not so much in the finesse of the individual mark, but in the orchestration of a previously uncodified set of personal ‘rules’ about where to act and where not, how far to go and when to stop, in such a way as the cumulative courtship of seeming chaos defines an original, hybrid kind of order, which in turn illuminates a complex sense of human experience not voiced or left marginal in previous art. Kirk Varnedoe, article ‘Your Kid Could Not Do This’
When I work I work very fast, but preparing to work can take any length of time. Cy Twombly