House No. 187: Homage to Cy Twombly

House No. 187: Homage to Cy Twombly

colored pencil on upcycled cardstock

5 in. x 7 in. x 4 in.

187/365; 07/06/11

I have a memory of first seeing the work of Cy Twombly — one of his blackboard paintings hanging adjacent to the coat check in the entrance of the Museum of Modern Art — when I was visiting during a high school art history field trip. I am not sure if my memory is accurate or created or even altogether fabricated.

It seems appropriate that I struggle to pinpoint that visual history in the thick fog of memory because that is how I view Twombly's work: impressions of visual and oral history in layers of imagining and reimagining, of remembering and forgetting and reinventing, all erased and re-drawn and partially obscured.

For the most part, the Abstract Expressionists struck me as all bravado and chest-thumping. Their work was machismo of cigars and bourbon and fast cars and sex. Not Twombly. His work, like his life, was elusive and introspective.

Unlike most of the hard-living Abstract Expressionists, Twombly lived into old age and continued to work and evolve. Yesterday, at 83, he left this world with a legacy of work that defines a moment in modern western art and continually redefined visual storytelling. For me, his work changed the way I saw and thought.