Sylvae 1981

Cy Twombly made this painting, Sylvae, on canvas, and you can see it's dated '81 at the top. The marks are so gestural! The color palette is mostly in a fleshy pink range, offset with vibrant, saturated red. It's easy to imagine Twombly at work— layers shifting, changing, emerging through trial, error, intuition. I feel like Twombly is always asking, what happens if I put this next to that? I sympathize with him— it’s like he's got this blank canvas staring back at him. There's texture, there's color, there's surface, and then there is that big stroke of pink. It rises upwards from the bottom edge like a cartoon cloud, maybe even a kind of pink smoke? All of those elements shape our experience, contribute to the feeling. It's clear that Cy was in conversation with other artists—maybe even talking back to them. This painting is less about answers, more about what can happen when ambiguity and uncertainty are embraced!