Looking for Cy Twombly

Rivkin writes in his excellent Cy Twombly biography: ‘“A Twombly looks,” writes one critic, “the way thinking sometimes feels.” And that is Twombly’s gift — the bewildering slipstream between thinking and feeling.’

I find myself approaching the same slipstream, though with different tools and a far wilder life journey.

Back in 2016, I wrote: “En mä voi netflix & chill koska se olis elämän haaskausta. Ja tää ei sit oo sitä, tää kelailu.” (I can’t Netflix & chill because that would be a waste of life. And this — this thinking — isn’t that.) Even then, I was circling something.

I also confessed: “Taide aspekti mun elämässä on vasta aluillaan eikä sillä kannata lähteä keulimaan — vastaanotto ei välttämättä olis hyvä.” (The art aspect of my life is only beginning, and it’s not worth hyping — the reception might not even be good.) I hear the uncertainty in those lines, but also a beginning spark.

Now, years later, I look again for Twombly. And what I find is not his marks, not his scrawled fragments, but a face by forcefully guided AI — painted, scarred, luminous. A Greek man weeping, eyes raw, mouth trembling, streaks of color flowing across the skin like paint and tears at once. It is both too much and exactly enough.

The autumn equinox approaches, and with it a turning. Darkness gathers, but not only darkness — balance. A poised moment between light and shadow, harvest and hunger, memory and beginning.

Something in me believes this is a threshold. That the weeping man is not despair but release, not collapse but the clearing before a breakthrough.

Looking for Cy Twombly, I find myself instead. And what I see is a practice on the verge of change — messy, vivid, unashamed.