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Cy Twombly — ‘My line is childlike but not childish. It is very difficult to fake ... to get that quality you need to project yourself into the child's line. It has to be felt.’
Cy Twombly

‘My line is childlike but not childish. It is very difficult to fake ... to get that quality you need to project yourself into the child's line. It has to be felt.’

A gestural tangle of looping graphite lines, smeared oil stick, and pooling ink sprawls across the textured Fabriano paper, evoking the spontaneous scrawl of a child's hand yet charged with deeply intentional mark-making. Twombly's layered strokes oscillate between chaos and control, blurring the boundary between writing, drawing, and pure bodily expression. The work embodies his belief that true artistic innocence is not inherited but laboriously reclaimed through complete emotional surrender to the act of mark-making.

Medium
graphite, oil stick and ink on Fabriano paper

🔨 Auction Lot

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

February 12, 2015

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About this work

Cy Twombly, ‘My line is childlike but not childish. It is very difficult to fake ... to get that quality you need to project yourself into the child's line. It has to be felt.’

A gestural tangle of looping graphite lines, smeared oil stick, and pooling ink sprawls across the textured Fabriano paper, evoking the spontaneous scrawl of a child's hand yet charged with deeply intentional mark-making. Twombly's layered strokes oscillate between chaos and control, blurring the boundary between writing, drawing, and pure bodily expression. The work embodies his belief that true artistic innocence is not inherited but laboriously reclaimed through complete emotional surrender to the act of mark-making.

Medium
graphite, oil stick and ink on Fabriano paper
Seen at
Phillips, New York, London, Hong Kong

Related themes

20th Century, Scrawl And Mark Making, Graphite And Ink, Renowned Artist, Male Artist, American Artist, Abstract Expressionism, Introspective Mood, Works on Paper, Monochromatic, Gestural Drawing, Cy Twombly

More works by Cy Twombly

Collected by

David Chen, Rocky Lindt, Art Institute of Chicago, Alex Capecelatro