Untitled 1978

Keith Haring made this untitled black ink drawing, and it's a frenzy of marks. It's like watching someone think, or maybe dance, right on the page. The drawing is a dense thicket of lines, but if you zoom in, you'll notice the ink isn't uniform. In some places, it's thick and juicy, and in others, it’s almost transparent. The pressure on the brush or pen must have changed with every stroke. There are moments where the lines seem to loop back on themselves, like thoughts circling, trying to find a way out, and this push and pull creates a real sense of energy. It feels like a coded language, somewhere between writing and pure abstraction. I'm reminded of Cy Twombly's scribbles, but where Twombly is romantic, Haring is all punk energy. You can see this directness in his subway drawings too. He shows us that art is always a conversation, a back-and-forth between artists across time.