Writing & drawing

On Saturday, I went by the Morgan Library to see Cy Twombly’s Treatise on the Veil (Second Version), together with twelve of his “drawings” which are related to the Treatise.

Cy Twombly’s work has stuck (like gum on the bottom of my shoe, I keep noticing it) with me ever since I saw The Italians at MoMA back in 2001.  For more than ten years (off and on) I’ve written about Twombly’s drawings and paintings — not in the way that an art critic would write about art, but the way a man with a piece of food stuck between his teeth tries to dislodge the speck of food with his tongue (but it won’t dislodge).

I spent about 45 minutes at the Morgan Library with Twombly’s Treatise on the Veil (Second Version) and took down several pages of notes which I plan on expanding in the coming days for a writing project I started (restarted?) last month.

Today, I was reading Richard Leeman’s book on Cy Twombly and found a quote by Paul Klee:

Writing and drawing are fundamentally the same.

I heard that said about handwriting (something I do regularly, into bound notebooks, onto lined paper with an ink pen), but Paul Klee’s statement could be understood more broadly.  I’m a writer; therefore, I am a drawer.  I decided to test the hypothesis.

In the space about fifteen minutes I made three drawings inspired by Twombly’s scribble phase and by Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus.

Patrick asked me what I was doing:  Pop, why are you scribbling into a notebook with your eyes closed?

Good question.

As I justified my experiment, the thought came to me that this is actually an interesting project: to draw in this way and to record my thoughts along the way.  I took a photograph of the first drawing.

I’d read that in the 1950s when Twombly was in the Army, he would draw at night, in the dark, so that he couldn’t see what he was doing.  So the eye was useless to him.  The drawing was the function of the hand.  To make this drawing, I closed my eyes and used my right hand.  I opened my eyes a few times just to check my progress.  Then stopped when I thought the drawing was done.

The whole process took just under a minute.  I realized immediately that I could fill an entire notebook with such scribbling in an afternoon.  Good or bad?  (Art in the age of mechanical reproduction?)  Will it be necessary to impose limits on my production of such drawings?

Patrick had a good question.  Pop, why is that when you draw in your notebook it looks like a five year old did it, but they hang Cy Twombly’s scribble-drawings in a museum?

Good question.

This is just the beginning of that inquiry.