Cy Twombly quotes

Cy Twombly was an American artist known for his abstract paintings featuring expressive scribbles and calligraphic marks. His work bridged the gap between drawing and painting, often incorporating elements of poetry and mythology. He became one of the most influential figures in postwar contemporary art. Here are 23 of his quotes:

I hate roses. Don't you? It's all right if you can hide them in a cutting garden, but I think a rose garden is the height of ick.

Cy Twombly

I'm drawn to the primitive, the ritual and fetish elements.

Cy Twombly

I've found when you get old you must return to certain things in the beginning, or things you have a sentiment for or something. Because your life closes up in so many ways or doesn't become as flexible or exciting or whatever you want to call it. You tend to be nostalgic. And I think about my boats. It's more complicated than that, but also it's going out and also there's a lot of references to crossing over. But the thing of the Nile boat in Winter's Passage: Luxor was about the wonderful thing, the lazy thing, of being two or three months in Luxor by the river. It was just that, it explains a winter passage. From a certain point to the other side: it's like the Greek boat that ferries you over to the other world. That sculpture didn't have it. But sometimes the large painting in Houston does have it. It's a passage through everything.

Cy Twombly

It's more like I'm having an experience than making a picture. So I've never had anyone around. I never have. People are different, but I have to really be with no interference. And it takes me hours. Painting a picture is a very short thing if it goes well, but the sitting and thinking... I usually go off on stories that have nothing to do with the painting, and sometimes I sit in the opposite room to where I work. If I can get a good hot story I can paint better, but sometimes I'm not thinking about the painting, I'm thinking about the subject. Lots of times I'll sit in another room and then I might just go in. It takes a lot of freedom. I'm working for two years on a subject now: ten paintings, and that can carry on for two years. I worked last summer and I started this summer and with just the simplest motif I just can't seem to do it. And everything slowed down.

Cy Twombly

I would've liked to have been Poussin, if I'd had a choice, in another time.

Cy Twombly

Graffiti is linear and it's done with a pencil, and it's like writing on walls. But in my paintings it's more lyrical.

Cy Twombly

Once I said to my mother: 'You would be happy if I just kept well-dressed and had good manners,' and she said: 'What else is there?'

Cy Twombly

I look at a lot of artists. I'm inspired by - I suppose I shouldn't say 'inspired,' but it's not really influenced. I am inspired. Art comes from art.

Cy Twombly

I used to change things in my early paintings to get the nuance or feeling I wanted, but now I plan everything in my head before I do it.

Cy Twombly

I work in waves because I'm impatient. It has to be done. I take liberties.

Cy Twombly

I respond to the Greek love of metamorphosis.

Cy Twombly

Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate - it is the sensation of its own realization. [a written art note by Twombly on a painting he created in 1957].

Cy Twombly

To paint involves a certain crisis, or at least a crucial moment of sensation or release. By crisis by no means limited to a morbid state, but could just as easily be an ecstatic impulse.

Cy Twombly

For myself the past is the source (for all art is vitally contemporary).

Cy Twombly

Probably even more than the architecture I'd be drawn to landscape. That's my first love, landscape... All kinds of landscape, if it's not cluttered up and vandalised. Yesterday we went out to Blenheim, and I love the flatness and the trees. I like all kinds. And where I'm from, the central valley of Virginia, is not one of the most exciting landscapes in the world, but it's one of the most beautiful. It's very beautiful because it has everything. It has mountains, there are streams, there are fields, beautiful trees. And architecture sits very well in it... And I've always lived in the south of Italy, because it's more excitable. It's volcanic. The land affects people naturally, that's part of the characteristics, for me, of a people, in a sense.

Cy Twombly

I knew a poet who was totally ignorant about botany. And I said: you can't be a poet without knowing any botany or plants and things like that; it's impossible, that's the first thing you should know.

Cy Twombly

I think of myself as a Romantic Symbolist.

Cy Twombly

In painting it is the forming of the image.

Cy Twombly

Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate - it is the sensation of its own realization.

Cy Twombly

I love my sculptures, and I was lucky I had them for 50 years because no one would look at them, and I really liked having them around.

Cy Twombly