Fifty Days at Iliam. Shades of Achilles, Patroclus, and Hector 1978

Here's Twombly’s Fifty Days at Iliam. Shades of Achilles, Patroclus, and Hector, made with paint and pencil on canvas. What strikes me is the raw energy, the freedom of his hand. The way he’s layered the paint, thin and almost translucent, gives this painting a ghostly quality. It’s like he’s channeling these ancient heroes—Achilles, Patroclus, and Hector—through his marks, his scribbles, and his color choices. I can almost feel the heat of battle in that blood-red cloud on the left. You can see the push and pull of the brush, the drips and splatters, like an echo of his physical movements. It’s hard to believe he wasn’t in some way possessed when he made this. I can feel his urgency, his need to get it down. And those names, scrawled on the canvas, are like whispers from the past. He's in conversation with the great painters who came before him. Painting becomes a way to access something timeless, something bigger than ourselves.