Overflow

Boy this slideshow feature at Slate takes me back. back to being a kid.

When I was a kid, at a point before I can very clearly remember, I loved painting and making art in a kid-like fashion. But I was a mess. I got paint everywhere. I missed spots. I strayed from the lines. I’m not talking at an excuseable three-year old age. I’m talking age eight, when my contemporaries had art hanging in the school halls, winning child art contests. I was a klutz – my attempts at crafts always had a little glue showing, a step missed, a visible “mistake.”

I just didn’t know they were mistakes until people pointed them out.

“That’s ugly.” “You missed a spot.” “Stay in the lines.” I came to know my artist self by others’ assessments of me. And early on I put my artist self in a drawer and strived to be a scholar, since that was something I could easily fulfill to everyone’s expectations of me.

Thirty years later, I am making art. And you know, it is what it is. The mistakes and all – all part of the creation. It all says, “Take my offering, mistakes and all. Or not. I enjoyed making this, for what it’s worth.”

That is also why I find such a kindred spirit in the art of Cy Twombly. His retrospective is on exhibit at the Whitney right now. He captures a spirit of pre-art, childlike, that defies any interpretation and criticism. His paintings are often unmistakeably purposefully huge, containing doodles and scribbles that stand, to me, as a monumental “Fuck You” to the critics and the assessors who instist that all art must meet standards, must “mean something,” to be considered art. Cy Twombly’s art is what it is and that’s all.

There are lots of artists whose work I like to go and see, but no one’s art makes me want to go right out and paint like Cy Twombly’s does. Luckily we have a shrine to his art right here in Houston. I can visit my muse at will. I stand before one of his wall-sized scribbles and he speaks to me. It’s like he’s saying, “Sure kid, go paint. Offer it up for what it is and nothing more. Defy criticism. It is what it is, mistakes and all.”