"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 was a seminal American artist who came of age immediately following the Abstract Expressionist generation. Born in Lexington, Virgina in 1928, his iconic large-scale paintings consisted of looping marks scribbled and smeared on raw canvas or linen. Twombly’s practice melded his interest in Roman and Greek mythological stories, including Leda and the Swan, with the frenetic doodling of chalk on a blackboard. “My line is childlike but not childish. It is very difficult to fake,” he once explained. “To get that quality you need to project yourself into the child's line. It has to be felt.”