Looking at Cy Twombly.

On Tuesday 20th September, as a class we looked at an artist called, Cy Twombly. We had to look at the kinds of techniques that he uses in order to achieve his pieces. We then had to take inspiration from his work and attempt to produce our own.
Examples of Cy Twombly's work:

Twombly uses inspiration from classic Greek and Roman literature, and the poetic features that come with them. He uses layers of paint to illustrate the fact that he is interested in the different time periods and context that is included in the history of Rome and Greece.

My attempt at using his style:

 Over the past week, we have been collecting words that describe our surroundings, which contributed towards both my observational skills and this task. After collecting these words, we were tasked with picking a couple of words that stood out most to us, which led to me drawing the word, 'Urban'. I wanted to illustrate my idea of an urban setting, which is why I used the colour black a lot and used a large scale.

 When I came back into college the next day, I had decided that I wanted to put an emphasis on the word urban and the fact that I see urban environments as unclean and a key factor of the causation of pollution. This is why I wrote the word, 'urban', out over and over again in black mediums.

After the previous step, I went into the studio and used white emulsion to layer over my work. I did this so that it would look similar to Cy Twombly's work. Due to the fact that he uses oil paints as a way of layering his work and that it isn't practical for us, we used white emulsion as it dries dramatically quicker and it is translucent (we can still see the dry materials through the layers of emulsion). Additionally, I applied more dry materials over the wet emulsion to bring back parts of the word that was covered up by too much paint.

Overall, I believe that I was successful in making my work look similar to Cy Twombly's work as the layering works well on top of the dry mediums and in some places, the white looks balanced when compared with the black. If I was going to make my work link more to Twombly's, I would add more colour and add more textures to it to show skill and also imply meaning.

Although I don't particularly like Cy Twombly's, I believe that he manages to use a variety of textures in his work in a meaningful and creative way. In some of his pieces, he uses scratches as a technique which I think is one of his best textures due to the fact that it tells a lot about his thought process.