Leda and the Swan 1962

Cy Twombly made this raw, beautiful painting with house paint and crayon, all scrubbed into the canvas with his hands. You know, looking at this, I can almost feel the energy of his hand moving across the surface, building up these layers of marks. He's got these scrawls of grey and black crayon, like a storm brewing, and then these fleshy pinks and reds that feel almost… violated? I imagine him circling the canvas, wrestling with the myth, trying to capture something about desire and violence and transformation all at once. It reminds me of other painters, like Joan Mitchell, who also used gesture and color to convey intense emotions and experiences. There's this sense that painting is a conversation, an exchange of ideas across time, where artists are constantly pushing each other to see and feel in new ways. For Twombly, it’s all about the push and pull of ambiguity, the embrace of uncertainty. It’s in these in-between spaces that the magic happens, where the possibilities of meaning are endless.