Cy Twombly Quotes

In painting it is the forming of the image.

Cy Twombly

• Painting

I respond to the Greek love of metamorphosis.

Cy Twombly

• Greek

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

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

Cy Twombly

• Work
• Done
• Waves

I show things in flux.

Cy Twombly

When I work I work very fast, but preparing the work can take any length.

Cy Twombly

• Work

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

• Romantic

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

Cy Twombly

• Art
• Past

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

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

• Art
• Experience
• History