Red Thread(s)

from an interview with Cy Twombly:
I work in waves, because I'm impatient. Because of a certain physicality, of lack of breath from standing. It has to be done and I do take liberties I wouldn't have taken before....

on The Bacchus paintings:
These were all done in a couple of months. It was just very ­physical; it's a process. I tried to do one since then, but it didn't work. It was the sensation of the moment; you can't warm it over, unless you want mannerism. When it does come, it's natural. I don't force it.

I'm not a professional painter, since I don't go to the studio and work nine to five like a lot of artists. When something hits me, or I see a painting, or when I see something in nature, it gives me a thing and I go for it. But I don't care if I don't go for three or four months. You know, when it comes it comes.

above: Untitled VII from Bacchus Series

The “true” -- if I may use what I am generally told is an outdated, if not outright suspect word -- seems to reside in the margins. In matters of presentation, style, etc. -- distrust of all showiness.

The work, unfathomable before its encounter, recedes once the book is closed. The “work” then, in terms of my recollection or commentary, is that of remnants.

*

“The really real thing that I have absolute faith in is the stars” says Moonsook, a character in Hong Sangsoo’s Woman on the Beach. When we look at the stars, we may notice very faint ones out of the corner of our eye; if we turn our gaze upon them, they disappear from view. The trick is holding them in the periphery.
And then there's the relativism of direct sight -- look at the blank space between two familiar stars through a pair of binoculars and the blackness opens up into a field of more and more stars. And nothing destroys our perception of a constellation more readily than a clear, moonless night in the country. Based on a few clear points, what we think of as a constellation is really more of a suggestion; something like a gesture, open to interpretation.