Pourin' one out of the Undergraduate Archives for Cy Twombly (1928-2011)

One of the reasons why Twombly has so heavily influenced me in my painting practice is because I can relate (in a most minute way) to the feelings surrounding being an American "living"/working in a foreign country (or more importantly, relate as a human navigating absurd spaces and times). In Twombly's work, there exists (to me) an acknowledgment of the psychological feeling of exile. And through his unique, chaotic documentation of that metaphysical explosion of the mind, translates a wholeness that bridges human hearts and brains. cheers.

Additionally, in an effort to show some respect for the late painter, and in an attempt to show more publicly my writing, I am exposing an excerpt from a paper I wrote on Cy Twombly in 2008:

"...Through this use of agitated, script-like gestures, Twombly’s “Rome” reads as logorrheic document, which offers a schizophrenic view of a cultural site. In post-modern theory, the term “schizophrenia” refers to how one perceives a mass of images once those images have lost their value as trustworthy signifiers. No longer is an image, or a group of images, able to fully define an idea. Rather, images now contain all and none of their original associations. The post-modern, schizophrenic experience is therefore a tautology of relative meanings and lies. This experience occurs not through a lucid realization of one’s stance within the timeline of past and future, but emphatically in the ever-evolving present.

Twombly’s choice to not reify Rome’s cultural history was a revolutionary and important, artistic one. Instead of creating a painting of Rome by sifting through his experiences in a search for the most uniquely Roman ones, Twombly created what Leo Steinberg refers to as a “flat-bed” painting. This style of painting does not discriminate between notable and non-notable expressions of one’s world, but rather acts as the surface onto which any natural, cultural, or psychological detritus may indiscriminately stick. This compositional style creates a beautifully revealing, or even abject record of a human life in a place. By doing this, Twombly highlights the disjunction between the self as one who can be defined by a cultural history, and the self as a tabula rasa who is subjected to many, overlapping, projected identities..."