right this minute i am staring at one of cy twombly’s paintings hero and leandro and there are a few called this actually but i’m looking at the one that has got a bit of brown at the bottom and a bit of green and the tiniest bit of what looks like neon pink in the middle although i can’t really describe it i’m just saying what its formal composition looks like

hero and leandro is actually what i would call a beautiful piece obviously i’m looking at beauty in a very private subjective way only finding things that might please just me i mean really that’s the only way to take beauty you can’t ever truly persuade someone that something is beautiful can you  one of my favourite bits of writing actually comes from Warhol when he’s talking about beauty and he says sometimes he says ‘this one’s a beauty’    and he says ‘i honestly don’t know what i’m talking about’   i mean honestly beauty is subjective and i don’t know what i’m talking about sometimes that’s why i find something beautiful and someone else might find it ugly that’s subjective for you  but i couldn’t pin down one reason that i might find it beautiful i just know that when i look at it i’m thinking yes    i  like that 

probably the composition maybe the way the paint is handled maybe it’s just the miniature fleck of pink but there is something that makes me think yes i’d like to look at that a lot more

so i’m looking at twombly’s evocative painting thinking about this aggression and remembering reading somewhere they were being described as vibrations or seismic lines or something like that but i think what really describes his tone           his application of paint is a 

‘precarious balance between inscription and effacement’

a scribbling out of something maybe a hiding of something or a revealing of something we can see very faintly that he has written words underneath the paint an inscription and then an effacement of this inscription but pointedly it is a precarious balance because are we looking at 

something that is covered and covered and covered because twombly decided he did not like it he did not like the writing there                                  was it planned before hand because if it was planned it sort of takes away that aggression doesn’t it

planned aggression 

that doesn’t really sound very aggressive anyway  a juxtapositioning of aggression is more spontaneous actually and that’s what his marks are suggesting that there is a spontaneity because it doesn’t look finished  and there are also other pieces in this series that look very similar

he could have sat down in his studio one day and thought ‘yes’ ‘today i will use only these colours’    and set himself a restriction to work with and then got frustrated with the restriction and then came the spontaneous aggression      

it’s almost like he’s trying to say something and then thinks    oh no didn’t mean that     oh dear it’s in oil paint    i’ll just paint over it again and again 

and that’s where the effacement comes from or rather spins out of control through his mark making and paint-pushing 

albert oehlen comes to mind when i am studying this piece albert oehlen executes marks 

‘that look spontaneous but are carefully planned’ 

now he is an artist that is quite a frantic worker he applied paint directly with his hands and covers and covers it up       again          very urgently it  although maybe not urgently enough because they do seem quite considered

some might actually say twombly was just as considered as oehlen  

the careful planning might actually have only been from when the piece first began to be made because you can get carried away 

at least i do when i am making a print i get carried away with the process and keep apply paint and applying paint and then suddenly i have gone too far maybe the careful planning stops this from happening in twombly and oehlen                but there is a very nice description  that goes further that points out exactly what his direct touch his direct application of paint does for us 

or for me anyway 

‘that touch – that would-be guarantee of aura through directness of bodily, and, by extension, psychic imprint – becomes the primary agent in building the painting’s surface’ 

we are communicating through his touch alone yet we are not touching we are looking but we are looking at his touch and then we are feeling it also    or at least i am feeling something which makes me replicate this action in my head          an action through painting that suggests    or mirrors 

so i am thinking about the action the surface becomes so much more than a surface it becomes a tool to record and mirror and accentuate anything that gets applied onto it in exactly the same way that twombly does  that sweeping     gestural abstraction that is the painting’s surface

most of these lines by twombly are strokes upon strokes upon strokes a very energetic effacement of that which lies underneath themselves maybe we should think of the piece in a way that sometimes pollock’s work is described with no real visual climax but rather just a mark or in pollock’s case a line on a line on a line in a very non-conclusive way

freid wrote that pollock’s drip paintings were 

‘woven together, (…) to invite the act of seeing on the part of the spectator and yet gives his eye nowhere to rest once and for all’ 

so we are invited to see by these lines by twombly and pollock but also we’re following them and following them and they’re not all that conclusive in themselves so it can be quite exhausting but also in a way meditative16  to look at                especially when they’re short and quite forceful by twombly and honestly some part of your brain will intervene and make you remember something that pulls the painting into a familiar field like a colour or a shape that you recognise because very few of us look at a painting and think i have no idea what this is about and i’m just going to stare at it mindlessly because i do not  mind that i don’t get it      because     eventually                    

                          it will always make you think of something or someone or somewhere so really i don’t think anything can be a pure abstraction 

these pieces are quite similar to my own prints actually  they have a sensibility or a precondition really to how they’re going to be finished   i often get asked     how do i know when i’ve finished a print because i could just print on top and on top again but there is a point that i just know where to stop   

i’m not very good at putting that into words because it is more of a physical stopping but i do remember that pollock got asked something similar and he was asked why didn’t he stop the painting when his image was exposed he said 

‘i chose to veil the imagery’ 

i mean for god’s sake that’s like asking why did you get dressed today  and me answering because i didn’t want to be undressed today   so it’s almost pointless asking that question to an artist i guess we stop      because we stop    

and that’s just the way it is sometimes that’s why we make decisions and make art   because we have this feeling that we must follow      it’s like an artist being criticised and we get asked all these provocative questions that are usually made to make us think and think and we do think a lot  but when it comes to critics they are

‘involved not so much in description as in evocation and evocation is pretty much what language is best suited for’ 

a summoning of thought i see that as     and critics try and think for us        think about what we might be doing or feeling     or why we might be doing that         but the language we use on canvas         is a different language the critics use             but the critics use language as a way to summon feelings or memories into the conscious mind       as david antin put it anyway     a language that summons thought or feeling and it really is about that    the words are doing what the art is doing but in a much more direct way    

there is an emotion that i learnt last monday called      

ambiguphobia 

which was actually coined by the american novelist david foster wallace to describe 

‘feeling uncomfortable about leaving things open to interpretation’ 

can you ever imagine an artist having to experience this emotion they’d go nuts and would never be seemingly satisfied with anything they produce because they’d have to go around with their work telling everyone exactly what it is they would like to be interpreted 

i had a crit the other day actually with a tutor nicki and i had never actually had a crit with her before but she said to me every time someone asks you what your work is about just make up a story make up a different story every time someone asks to be told what the work is about and i looked at her and thought about it 

and she mentioned again 

every time you look at your work make up something different something exciting or something banal but at least whatever it is will evoke a response because the work is strong enough to do that 

these strong quite urgent marks that i make in my own prints are mirrored in both twombly’s and oehlen’s paintings so really can’t we just make up a different story every time we look at them or listen to a piece of music every time we look   so that we might evoke something different every time

instantly well not really truly instantly 

but instantly i get this aggression with the really physical mark making from twombly and it’s not just one type of mark but there are brush marks and then what i think are fingermarks and then there is the drip mark at the bottom and they’re all sort of covering each other’s mark layer upon layer and similar colour over    which is actually ironic seeing as the first thing this painting has made me think of is aggression it’s the kind of aggression that i was told i had in my wip crits a couple of weeks back now this girl from sculpture looked at me and then at my work and then told me how i must be hiding something deep and dark and mysterious because my work was so aggressive and i was just this nice polite young girl that had just come to do a crit for the day and then she saw my work and suddenly i became someone different  but only different in her eyes because really i couldn’t give a toss how i looked 

i just cared that my work was evoking a response in such an unusual way by someone i had never met before and the fact that i was getting a response at all that was what really mattered 

does it ever really matter what the response is so long as it is a response?