Cy Twombly: inspiration for surface texture and personal rationale
Cy Twombly’s famously inimitable art is tensely balanced between expressively abstract and suggestively pictorial impulses. His work originated under the auspices of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s and early 1950s and advanced uniquely along lines afforded by its freedoms. Twombly’s entire enterprise is characterized by unruly marks—stammering, energetic, and raw—that merge drawing, painting, writing, and symbolic glyphs. Scrawled, overwritten, erased, or willfully misspelled, words cite people, places, events, and stories nominally derived from Greco-Roman culture and history, especially literature, poetry, and myth.
1. Specific colour/surface qualities
My first source of inspiration within Twombly’s work are the specific surface qualities of some of his works.
(i) combining media
Many of my favourite works tend to be those where the layering of marks and colour ends in a subtle grey or off-white surface. In these compositions, Twombly’s dynamic, energetic mark-making is offset by the choice of more muted colours than in much of his work, giving the pieces a quieter quality. At the same time, Twombly’s skilled mixing of different media lends a tactile complexity to his compositions. For instance, in Hero and Leandro Part II (1984, pictured right), the surface of subtle, gestural marks in grey, cream, and off-white is given a harsher dimension by a spiky graphite scrawl at the lower edge of the composition. This gives an otherwise soft, delicate work an air of uneasiness and tension. With the context of the work’s title, for me, this evokes the complexity of feelings of the mythical story itself, wherein the engagement with the romance between Hero and Leander is undercut by a creeping apprehension of the tragic outcome before it arrives.
(ii) dramatic power of mark-making & colour
Hero and Leandro (A Painting in Four Parts) Part II (1984)
Untitled Part VII (1988)
2.
Untitled (1957)
Hero and Leandro (A Painting in Four Parts) Part III (1984)