Unshrinking Line
Today is a day of unshakeable faith, unwavering line, and apparent questionable doubt.
Today, amongst other things, it was announced and spread like a burning line on a dry sketchbook's page, that artist/painter/thinker Cy Twombly died.
And it's one of those passings that surprisingly hits harder than others.
What it was that he did was create an art whose aura held in it no falseness, no overly-meditated moments, and had within its boundaries of frame a detectable jubilance.
Here is a quote that Yours Truly gleaned from still the world's best journal, the NYT:
In the only written statement that Mr. Twombly ever made about his work, a short essay in an Italian art journal in 1957, he tried to make clear that his intentions were not subversive but elementally human. Each line he made, he said, was “the actual experience” of making the line, adding: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.”
An artist in their own words is what any student, looker, or fan should strive to find.
Now YT is recalling with a small shudder one instructor (in overly-designed outfits) at Parsons School of Definition who recoiled at the quest of YT to learn about just who in hell we were reading, whose words we were sucking on about the very matter at hand - understanding the need and the motivation and the science of Art behind the Art.
It is the same as Loving a painting yet never bothering to learn the artist's name, nor its title.
Information does matter and, ironically, there is a sometimes deliberate unwillingness to dive into Why in this age of the over-informed.
Maybe that's over-informed in matters of triviality, and the lessening of mental responsibility if it's always an app away to snap-tell and Google.
YT still enjoys the jarring Why.
Anyone who makes a line hopes for a line without consciousness, over-awareness, awkward self-editorializing, jumping-to-guns of opine.
YT has oso many tales to tell of things that transpired in San Francisco, in the Shiney Apple, and points beyond.
But it's time to walk away from the backlit world and jump back in to the other.
Love of Other.
