Cy Twombly

Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly, Jr. (April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011) was an American painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. He painted of large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic and graffiti-like works on solid backgrounds of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. In 1951–2 he studied at Black mountain college, this was an important period for his involvement with Abstract Expressionism. His paintings are now in the permanent collections of the New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Musée du Louvre in Paris.

Many of his later paintings and works on paper shifted toward "romantic symbolism", their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words which were written in his signature stylised handwriting. In the 1960s Twombly used subjective, erotic signs in his paintings, and he began to use more intense and denser colours. Twombly often quoted the poet Stéphane Mallarmé as well as the names of mythical figures. Examples of this are his Apollo and The Artist and a series of eight drawings consisting solely of inscriptions of the word "VIRGIL”. Between 1967 and 1971 the 'grey paintings'. This series features terse, colourless scrawls, reminiscent of chalk on a blackboard, that form no actual words. He used the unusual technique of sitting on the shoulders of a friend, who moved back and forth along the length of the canvas. This allowed Twombly to create fluid, continuous lines.

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

I visited Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery photographed some of the works which I feel can be interpreted interestingly in terms of layers. These are four which I have selected due to their diversity:

John Armstrong (1893-1973)
Lapping waters, 1944
Tempera on Panel
This is a surrealist piece painted during the second world war. The method of painting involves many small dots or squares of colour to produce a mosaic like effect and the paint has been layered to give it a rough pastel finish. The sphere balanced on the tripod of pincers has a strong ominous architectural element to it. This overpowers the background which contains dark orange hues of a sunset, attempting to bring warmth to the painting. The waves are like layers of darkness with jagged edges threatening to consume the sphere or float it away from the grasp of the pincers. The layered mosaic style of the waves gives them movement and ferocity but also a mountainous stony effect.

Helen Chadwick

Helen Chadwick was a British conceptual artist who specialised in sculpture, photography and installation art. She was born in 1953 and studied at Brighton Polytechnic and the Chelsea School of Art. Chadwick was shortlisted for the Tuner Prize in 1987 and lectured at the Royal College of Art, Chelsea School of Art and the London Institute before dying of a viral infection in 1996 aged 42. Her incredible work has inspired a younger generation of artists to break usual conventions. She is notorious for her role in feminism and use of unusual organic materials such as meat, chocolate, bronze, flowers and rotting vegetable matter. Much of her work centres around desire and repulsion. Another focus of hers was the presentation of the female body and she often juxtaposed life and beauty with death and decay to create complex works which defied usual artistic boundaries.

An example of this is Ruin (left) a Cibachrome photograph on display at Richard Saulton in London as part of the exhibition "Helen Chadwick: Works From The Estate" which opened in May 2013 to mark what would have been her 60th birthday. It is 91.5 x 46 cm and was produced in 1986. This piece strips back the layers of life and presents in in all its stages: vitality, decay and death. It features Chadwick posing naked in the foreground with her hand resting on a skull and her head turned away, shielded by her left arm as if she cannot bear to face the impermanence of her beauty and life.

Her right arm is in a potentially suppressive motion; as if she is attempting to bury the skull and hide it to present only herself as the freshest layer of the life cycle. Conversely she could be supporting herself on it, representing than life builds upon death. It also illustrates how she is anchored to her fate whether she acknowledges it or not. As it is a photograph it has more impact than if it were painted as the strong reactions that the realism of a photograph produces contrast with how unconventional it's subject is.