Monthly Archives: March 2009

Twomblys: Story of a Family Resemblance

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You might have noticed my affinity for Twombly the Elder here or here. I say Twombly the Elder because Cy Twombly has a son who is also an artist. Like his father, Alessandro Twombly toes the line between abstract and representational forms in his paintings such as the one above. He lives in Tuscany and likes to garden.

How did I find out those last personal tidbits? My mom’s copy of Elle Decor (inspiration comes from unexpected places) that features his home.
The artist is better known for his sculptures, like the one below. This sculpture seems to grow out of it’s narrow base in a clumpy, natural process like tree branches. Behind it you can find more of the artist’s paintings. Look at them carefully.

I love the lush colors and huge size of the naturalistic forms, but something struck me as a little strange about the paintings. They remind me of his father’s last show at Gagosian (a lot!) pictured on the left. The palate is the same, only reversed between the grouping of round blossoms and bright background. Soooo, it’s strikingly odd that father and son have such similar paintings (colors, compositions, size, material).
Does a family resemblance really extend to paintings? What happened here?

Melissa Meyer’s Dancing Paintings

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Lang, 2008

Word on the street was that the Melissa Meyer show at Lennon, Wienberg Inc. was worth seeing, so I was lucky I made it down there this weekend before it closed. Canvases, like Lang above, are larger than you would expect and the oils in some places have the thinness of watercolors.

Meyer was in the gallery, and she described how she works with the canvases flat on the floor and paint them in layers. She thinks of the linear marks she makes as “dancing.”

Galvin, 2008

Her work is rooted in Abstract Expressionism, and in these large paintings she achieves an effect rather like watercolors with the play of light and space. I found I really enjoyed just looking at them and tracing the different layers and marks. The marks don’t come together to mean anything, but watching how they interact is beautiful.

Sleepwalkers..Doug Aitken, Tilda Swinton, Myself.

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You know, typical Saturday night. I had some wine, and somehow that left me up at 4:27 AM remembering the film Doug Aitken did on the walls of MoMA the winter of 2007. (Hint: it was cool.)


The actors, such as Tilda Swinton and Chan Marshall of Cat Power, are cool. Screening your film on the huge walls of MoMA is cool. Waiting in the cold as snow starts falling to see how the different characters wake up, just for a short time, out of the comatose of their lives was also pretty cool. (Read: I am cool.)

So somehow when up at this time my thoughts drift to Sleepwalkers. I still remember how neat the experience of watching it was. The narrative played out on the city streets, with people hustling by or starting to look. Different parts of the film were shown on different walls, so the viewer had to walk around MoMA to see what other parts of the narrative.

This is a longer clip that gives you a better feel for the pacing and experience of watching at MoMA. The viewing process was fragmented, so you could never see anything at once and had to put it together in your head. Aitken says of the structure of the film that “the narratives interlock in a kinetic synchronicity and expand and break apart again. It’s almost like chaos theory.” Aitken, by the way, has also made videos for Fatboy Slim and Interpol.

So with that I leave you, well-rested reader, and may you all have a happy, bright Sunday morning. Enjoy your coffee and your blogs.

I will be sleeping.