CY TWOMBLY, quotes on painting art- by the artist creating after American Abstract Expressionism
Cy Twombly (1928 – 2011), quotes on painting art and life in American Abstract Expressionism. Twombly is seen as a abstract calligraphy-painter using later a more symbolic image language with mythology references. In 1951 he met Robert Rauschenberg, who encouraged him to attend Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina. At Black Mountain in 1951 and 1952 he studied with Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Ben Shahn, and met John Cage. Later in his life Twombly created a lot of sculpture.
* At the bottom art links for more biography and life facts for the American artist Cy Twombly.
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Cy Twombly: characteristriv mixture of painting/drawing |
Cy Twombly, quotes on painting art by the artist, creating after American Abstract Expressionism
– I’m drawn to the primitive, the ritual and fetish elements.
* source of his quote, Cy Twombly made in January 1952, ‘Editions du Regard’, p.13; as quoted in ‘A monograph’, M.Whittall, London,Thames & Hudson, 2005ns du Regard. p. 9
– For myself the past is the source (for all art is vitally contemporary).
* source of his quote, Cy Twombly made in January 1952, ‘Editions du Regard’, p.13; as quoted in ‘A monograph’, M.Whittall, London,Thames & Hudson, 2005ns du Regard. p. 9
– In painting it is the forming of the image.
* source of Twombly’s art quote: ‘In painting it is the forming of the image’ Cy Twombly, in “L’Esperienza moderna”, 1957; as quoted in “Cy Twombly, a monograph”, Richard Leeman / picture research Isabelle d’Hauteville. London, 2005 p. 239
– Whiteness can be the classic state of intellect, or a neo-romantic area of remembrance – or the symbolic whiteness of Mallarme. (Cy Twombly defined whiteness inthis way, fh)
* source of Twombly’s art quote: ‘In painting it is the forming of the image’ Cy Twombly, in “L’Esperienza moderna”, 1957; as quoted in “Cy Twombly, a monograph”, Richard Leeman / picture research Isabelle d’Hauteville. London, 2005 p. 239
– Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate — it is the sensation of its own realization. (a written art note by Twombly on his painting during 1957.
* source of his art quote: ‘Writings, Oct 2008’, Flash Art International, Laura Cherubini (translation from Italian: Beatrice Barbareschi)
– I think of myself as a Romantic symbolist.
* source of his art quote he made in 1994: “Cy Twombly, a monograph”, Richard Leeman / picture research Isabelle d’Hauteville. London, 2005 p. 103
– I show things in flux.
* source of his art quote he made in 1994: “Cy Twombly, a monograph”, Richard Leeman / picture research Isabelle d’Hauteville. London, 2005 p. 35
– I respond to the Greek love of metamorphosis.
* source of his art quote he made in 1994: “Cy Twombly, a monograph”, Richard Leeman / picture research Isabelle d’Hauteville. London, 2005 p. 233
– When I work I work very fast, but preparing the work can take any length.
* source of the quote: ‘photo-exhibition Cy Twombly’, museum Marseille Amsterdam, autumn 2008
Interview: Cy Twombly & Review: The Sculpture, Kunstmuseum Basel, by David Sylvester
( source of these artist quotes is the interview: ‘Cy Towmbly, 2000’, in “Interviews with American Artists by David Sylvester”, David Sylvester, Chatto and Windus – London 2001, p. 173 and further)
CT (Cy Twombly): – Probably even more than the architecture I’d be drawn to landscape All kinds of landscape, if it’s not cluttered up and vandalised. Yesterday we went out to Blenheim, and I love the flatness and the trees. I like all kinds. And where I’m from, the central valley of Virginia, is not one of the most exciting landscapes in the world, but it’s one of the most beautiful. It’s very beautiful because it has everything. It has mountains, there are streams, there are fields, beautiful trees. And architecture sits very well in it. And I’ve always lived in the south of Italy, because it’s more excitable. It’s volcanic. The land affects people naturally, that’s part of the characteristics, for me, of a people, in a sense.
CT – Well, I have a nostalgia now for northern Europe at this time of the year when there are the white nights in Russia. I love to go to St Petersburg during the winter nights at the end of June. The Russians are really nostalgic for nature. They have a love of the land. Every time you see a book on Leningrad or anything there’s architecture, but a third of it is always going to be the gardens and the nature and the flowers. Anywhere there’s a grave of a poet or a painter there’s always fresh flowers put. Pushkin. I like that; it’s probably nineteenth-century but it has a wonderful kind of sentiment to it.
CT: – I’ve found when you get old you must return to certain things in the beginning, or things you have a sentiment for or something. Because your life closes up in so many ways or doesn’t become as flexible or exciting or whatever you want to call it. You tend to be nostalgic. And I think about my boats. It’s more complicated than that, but also it’s going out and also there’s a lot of references to crossing over. But the thing of the Nile boat in Winter’s Passage: Luxor was about the wonderful thing, the lazy thing, of being two or three months in Luxor by the river. It was just that, it explains a winter passage. From a certain point to the other side: it’s like the Greek boat that ferries you over to the other world. That sculpture didn’t have it. But sometimes the large painting in Houston does have it. It’s a passage through everything.
CT: – And I am very happy to have the boat motif because, when I grew up, in summer with my parents we were always in Massachusetts, and I was always by the sea. You know, sometimes little boys love cars, but I had a particular passion for boats, and now I live by the sea. For sure, it is a passage, but it’s also very fascinating for lots of things. When you get interested in something you can find out a lot about things. You might meet people who are interested in one subject or another, like they collect palms. I’ve found people from all over the world who were fanatical about palms, which you wouldn’t know unless you were interested in palms. And the sea: because, if you’ve noticed, the sea is white three quarters of the time, just white – early morning. Only in the fall does it get blue, because the haze is gone. The Mediterranean, at least – the Atlantic is brown – is just always white, white, white. And then, even when the sun comes up, it becomes a lighter white. Only in the fall is the Mediterranean this beautiful blue colour, as in Greece. Not because I paint it white; I’d have painted it white even if it wasn’t, but I am always happy that I might have. It’s something that has other consciousness behind it.
DS (David Silvester): – When you were young, were the boats that especially interested you river boats or sea-going boats?
CT.: They were fishing boats usually, because I was always down at Gloucester where the Portuguese had the fishing boats off the Grand banks. But there are millions of inlets, all of New England is inlets; it’s not a straight coast, it’s thousands of miles of inlets. They’re always full of boats, row boats, sail boats, every kind of boat.
DS: When you did the very large painting which you talked about before and which you finally called Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the shores of Asia Minor, did you have the idea when you were working on it, or quite early in working on it, that it was about this thing of passage?
CT: No, no, I don’t think it had. There were certain areas that were always there. I wanted to use Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which is just everything, and I got very excited about it. I got different copies; I got a second edition, because I like to have the material that’s as close as possible to when it was done: you’re absorbing, a kind of instinct or something. And then work went on so long and never got anywhere too much. It was hanging in a big room in Rome, two side panels on one wall; it’s four meters tall and sixteen meters long. Then I decided I had to call it after a Keats poem and I liked it. Sometimes I like a title to give me impetus or a direction or a feel for the way it should go. Sometimes it changes. Because it had already taken five or six years – not working for three of them – I thought it had taken so long, it was languid and I wanted to call it On the Mists of Idleness. I think it’s the title of a poem; it might be a line.
DS: I don’t remember that there’s a Keats poem with that title, but I could be wrong or perhaps it’s a line or a phrase. But actually I suspect that it’s your own conflation of two different lines of his: ‘Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ and ‘The blissful cloud of summer-indolence’.
CT: Well the painting went on and finally it was painted and, because I had to pass by it every day, I took it down. And then on that wall the original windows were reopened so that there was no place ever to hang it. And when they did my gallery in Houston, I thought I’d just send it back to America and maybe in one of the warehouses I could finish it. Then I went to Virginia and a friend of mine had a warehouse just near my house and I said, ‘Oh, let’s ship the painting to Lexington and all the paint’, and I did it there, all sort of one winter. And so all the images of boats, they’re like prehistoric things, and there’s a beautiful Celtic boat with lots of oars. That had started a couple of years before. I had already read Catullus, and the image came that is one of the really beautiful lines. I very much like Catullus and you can just visualize his brother by reading that line. You know the line: ‘Say goodbye, Catullus, to the shores of Asia Minor.’ It’s so beautiful. Just all that part of the world I love. The sound of ‘Asia Minor’ is really like a rush to me, like a fantastic ideal. In most paintings I never even have titles. But in certain ones I really have to have them.
DS: And the title come while you’re working?
CT: No, just sometimes. Always before this something happens, like those early paintings – Criticism and Free Wheeler and those all-over paintings. Jasper Johns and Bob Rauschenburg were there. We were going to show the work and we made a list and then gave the titles to the different paintings.
DS: But after they already existed?
CT: The paintings existed. But when I did Four Seasons I was planning to do The Four Seasons. And I wanted specifically each season to be distinct.
DS: But were you saying before that sometimes, while you’re working on a painting, a title comes and then that title influences how you go on with the painting. Did you say that just now or did I misunderstand you?
CT: No, in the large paintings it changed, but actually I didn’t have an idea of which one of the three titles it would be until at Houston I decided on Catullus. Everything is very flexible; it is with me and very quick in changing. Although I must say I have a certain order in my mind, but as far as painting goes there’s enormous – probably more than with a lot of people – freedom. Because I have to get in a state of mind. And that’s why I’ve slowed down.
Before, I used to smoke and look, because smoking is very conducive to stimulating the mind. Finally I had to stop because it was overstimulating my lungs. I sort of work off and on and I usually paint eight hours and never eat. And I might have some wine to stimulate a free passage of thought. And I used to have always music playing. What is that painting of mine in Philadelphia? Is it Fifty Days in Iliam? It’s very strange, no one has ever mentioned it. Have you ever seen it? Well it’s one of a large group of paintings. It’s called Fifty Days in Iliam; I spelt it I-L-I-A-M, which is not correct. It’s U-M. But I wanted that, I wanted the A for Achilles; I always think of A as Achilles; I wanted the A there and no one ever wrote and told me that I had misspelt Ilium. I’m saying anyone in America.
DS: So what did they do, just change the title or leave it?
CT: No they still called it Iliam, but no one ever noticed that.
DS: They may have noticed it but been too polite to say because they thought you were making a mistake.
CT: Or no one cares. But Iliam was for the A in Achilles, because I did that Vengeance of Achilles with the A shape. Also it’s the Achilles thing and the shape of the A has a phallic aggression – more like a rocket. It’s pointed. The Vengeance of Achilles is very aggressive. My whole energy will work, and instruments and things will have a very definite male thrust. The male thing is the phallus, and what way to describe the symbol for a man than the phallus, no? Also it comes into the boat. I always make a direction that’s pointed: it goes out and it’s difficult to use sometimes, because it goes one way, from left to right, but it deals with subject matter that probably has a certain sensuality. The female is usually the heart or a soft shape, and certainly very painterly. There’s a lot of tactile paint in those… you know which ones? Some of them got very heavy, like the last of the series called Ferragosto. It really gets heavy because paint is a certain thing. I don’t have a dislike for it, but those paintings, for instance were done in August in terrific heat in Rome. All my things, every one of them, show a certain agitation. And I have a certain kind of knowledge of things. And there are certain elements that I use. This double image like the brown paint, it’s verbal. There’s a Jungian example of a small child. It’s based on the use of words, how you effect the child.
The child is in the bathroom and the father gets very anxious. So he goes to the door and says ‘What are you making?’ and she says ‘Four horses and a carriage’. She was making a sculpture. Because children have that. It’s a sort of infantile thing, painting. Paint in a sense is a certain infantile thing. I mean in the handling. I start out using a brush but then I can’t take the time because the idea doesn’t correspond, it gets stuck when the brush goes out of paint in a certain length of time. So I have to go back and by then I might have lost the rest of it. So I take my hand and I do it. Or I have those wonderful things that came in later: paint sticks. Because the pencil also breaks if the canvas is too rough. So I had to find things that I could use, like my hands or the paint sticks. I can carry through the impetus till it stops. It’s continual. I mean, I’m talking about specifics, the heavy kind. And also, when I talked about the Jungian thing…I use earth things and certain human things as symbols for earth – like it might be excrement but it’s earth. And I did those charts, big palettes… two or three paintings with palettes and all of the colours – pink, flesh, brown, red for blood. And I think with most painters you can think and it can change very fast, the impetus of what something is. It’s instinctive in a certain kind of painting, not as if you were painting an object or special things, but it’s like coming through the nervous system. It’s like a nervous system. It’s not described, it’s happening. The feeling is going on with the task. The line is the feeling, from a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning. It’s like I’m experiencing something frightening, I’m experiencing the thing and I have to be at that state because I’m also going.
I don’t know how to handle it. Pollock, when you see him working… To me, Pollock is the height of American painting. It’s very lyrical. Gorky, who is very passionate, can copy a drawing or take a drawing and copy it exactly as a painting, and Miro can too, it’s amazing. Miro can do a drawing to paint and that’s another training in a sense. So there’s a certain mannerism that comes in both of them, and probably everything becomes obvious in time. But I don’t have that. The line is illustrated or the colour. I’m sure it has great feeling when they’re doing it, but it’s more towards defining something. It has a certain clarity because it’s a complex thing. I’m a painter and my whole balance is not having to think about things. So all I think about is painting. It’s the instinct for the placement where all that happens. I don’t have to think about it. So I don’t think of composition; I don’t think of colour here and there. Sometimes I alter something after. So all I could think is the rush. This is in certain things and even up to now, like The Four Seasons, those are pretty emotionally done paintings. And I have a hard time now because I can get mentally ill. I usually have to go to bed for a couple of days. Physically I can’t handle it, and I can’t build myself. You know, my mind goes blank. It’s totally blank. I cannot sit and make an image. I cannot make a picture unless everything is working. It’s like a state.
DS: Like a state. Ecstatic?
CT: Ecstatic, exactly. I’m usually in a very good humour, except that I can be a little violent if it’s going bad. If I’m making a mess I get a little sadistic with the paint, but usually I’m enjoying myself. It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture. So I’ve never had anyone around. I never have. People are different, but I have to really be with no interference. And it takes me hours. Painting a picture is a very short thing if it goes well, but the sitting and thinking…I usually go off on stories that have nothing to do with the painting, and sometimes I sit in the opposite room to where I work. If I can get a good hot story I can paint better, but sometimes I’m not thinking about the painting, I’m thinking about the subject. Lots of times I’ll sit in another room and then I might just go in. It takes a lot of freedom. I’m working for two years on a subject now: ten paintings, and that can carry on for two years. I worked last summer and I started this summer and with just the simplest motif I just can’t seem to do it. And everything slowed down. The sculptures: I don’t know, because I like the singularity of them. And I might be able to do sculptures, but the painting is less and less.
DS: Going back, which word is more accurate, ‘ecstasy’ or ‘trance’?
CT: That I don’t know. If you’re a saint, maybe ‘ecstasy’. Well, you know, trance and ecstasy are slightly different. Ecstasy is a little more overt; trance is more passive, more dreamy, and so you’re lost; whereas with ecstasy all kinds of images can come in – fireworks, Jesus and what have you.
DS: So ‘trance’ was wrong; ‘ecstasy’ was better?
CT: Probably better just to say ‘excitable’.
DS: Well ‘rush’ was pretty good.
CT: ‘Rush.’ But that is such a contemporary word. I think that’s even in a young culture, driving fast in a car or jumping off those bridges and things. It’s a rush I guess. But ‘rush’ to me is too focused. Whereas it’s the instinct and the motion and the whole all together. And it functions in different directions. It’s not the focus. It goes beyond. It’s something else where everything runs together. If you’re in that state all the time you’d be dizzy, you’d fall down.
DS: And the sculpture (later in his life Twombly made more and more sculpture, fh) is more tranquil?
CT: It’s a whole other state. And it’s a building thing. Whereas the painting is more fusing – fusing of ideas, fusing of feelings, fusing projected on atmosphere.
Cy Twombly, short biography facts about the life and creation of the American artist
Edwin Parker (Cy) Twombly, Jr. (1928 – 2011) was an American artist well known for his large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings, on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. He exhibited his paintings worldwide. Many of his later paintings and works on paper moved into “romantic symbolism”, and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words. Twombly often quoted the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, as well as many classical myths and allegories in his works. He was born in Lexington, Virginia and later in his life mainly in Italy.
Art links for more biography and life facts and art of the Cy Twombly
* biography and many life facts of the American painter artist Cy Twombly, on Wikipedia
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