Cy Twombly: April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011

I’m sorry to interrupt your regular food programming but today I was saddened to read of artist Cy Twombly’s passing just yesterday. He has nothing to do with food but quite a lot to do with this blog. Does this piece of his entitled “Cold Stream” (from 1966) look familiar? If so you are one of my earliest readers!

When I first envisioned writing a blog I had intended to write about the myriad of crazy and usually trivial and fleeting personal interests, political concerns du jour, technological and diet obsessions, family quirks and childhood memories that made up my somewhat semi-conscious idea stream each week. I had thought I could weave their somewhat disparate qualities into a tapestry of meaning. (Ha!) I am a long time fan of Twombly’s large-scale scribble style graffiti paintings, specifically the one shown above, and I saw a connection to the ‘vibe’ I wanted here. So I gravitated towards them to serve as my thematic inspiration.

Cy Twombly: April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011

Although I very quickly latched onto food (or devolved to food?) as my device for the inane, random and and not-well-thought out dross featured here, Twombly’s visual style would continue to inspire Sis. Boom. blog!’s graphic look for its first year and a half. (The recent design change was meant to finally come to grips with our food theme yet I tried to keep its irreverence with the hidden and not so hidden salutes to the modern graffiti artist Banksy.)

This blog’s early page backgrounds, banners, and even the side panels were all a blatant ripoff of his masterpieces or actual artistic details scaled and/or slightly altered to fit the Blogger space requirements:

Twombly’s work showed me see that even free-flowing and unhinged artistic expression could have a beautiful order, meaning, and larger expression of thought. Qualities I wished for my shared writings and thoughts.

Now I cook and write about beets. Sigh.

Please take a moment to scroll through this gallery of his work to see if it might inspire you as well. How could you not love an artist who inspired the following sentence from Jerry Saltz’s terrific memorial to his artistry:

[Twombly]… erupted with a series of tantalizing, orgiastic scenes of scrotal shapes, flying vaginas, floating pudenda, abstract anuses, and a liquidity that art critic David Sylvester once compared to stains left on bed sheets after lovemaking.

 
If only I saw the same things as David Sylvester I would have made a banner out of this one!

Tonight I lift a glass (and possibly more) to you Cy Twombly!