Rocks (for C.T.)
oil on panel 12" x 18"
The news of Cy Twombly's passing brought my thinking about my work into sharper focus I had been dissatisfied lately - too controlled, too tight, too much dictated by subject - what one artist called the tyranny of the 'things'. Twombly's life's work of proving gain and again that marks are just marks - paintings are first and foremost just flat surfaces with scrawls and grease and pigment on them - and yet what a visceral effect the scrawls always had on me (the viewer). I think this effect had to do with the envy/discovery of such freedom of exploration.
This morning's paper had a column about surfer/adventurer Laird Hamilton. Hamilton is a man who has spent a lifetime finding the bigger, further, faster - riding the heaviest waves and courting fear as one would a pretty girl. The writer, Sally Jenkins, writes of Hamilton's 'ability to resolve it (terror) into grace', his 'agility and strength, courage yet surrender' and most importantly perhaps, 'recognition and release'. Hamilton describes how he functions as 'Its not so much the vastness of the wave, it is more about the insignificance of us. When you become insignificant is when you truly begin to participate. That's when it becomes a harmonious act'.
The description of what Laird Hamilton does in a physical, athletic world crystallized for me what I recognize in Cy Twombly's work - a surrender of any notion of control or dominance in order to become 'a harmonious act'; allowing the real experience of living, seeing, marking our place in this world to take over from any notion that we might control or know. The best art, it seems to me, filters life experience through one's soul and is left behind like crumbs left by children in the dark forest.
So, I will cut loose and embrace the chaos of visual life, like riding an immeasurable, vast rogue wave. This painting, then, is offered to you as one of my markers, a pathway to my record of time and marks and shapes and space.
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