Untitled 1954

Cy Twombly made this untitled painting with paint and crayon, and it’s a real head-scratcher, isn't it? There's this off-white ground, a pale field where scribbles and smudges live, like ghosts of thoughts. The marks are nervous, kind of agitated – quick flicks of crayon, scratches that dig into the surface. Look at the top left, where the grey almost gathers into a storm cloud, a build up of energy. Then there's the creamy yellow ochre that seeps through, staining the white. It is as if these marks were made, and then partially erased, almost like handwriting fading away. What I like about Twombly is that he embraces process. There are no mistakes, only gestures. This piece reminds me a little of Robert Rauschenberg’s erased de Kooning drawing, but where Rauschenberg sought to obliterate, Twombly seems interested in something else. He's reaching for some way to make marks disappear even as they come into being. In his work, art isn't so much about answers as it is about a continuous process of questioning.