The Geeks 1955

"The Geeks" by Cy Twombly is like a beautiful storm of scribbles trapped on a surface, made with something simple like graphite or charcoal. The artist clearly wasn't after perfection here, but more interested in seeing where his hand would take him, a real record of movement and chance. Looking closely, you can see each line has its own character. Some are dark and bold, others are faint whispers. Some wiggle and dance like spaghetti. It's a whole universe of marks living together. There's one particular area on the left, where the lines bunch up, almost like a tangled fishing net. It's dense and chaotic. This part shows how the build-up of simple marks can create a complex texture, like the layers of our own thoughts. I'm reminded of drawings by Brice Marden, who also used repetition to build dense and mesmerising compositions. Both artists invite us to find beauty in the imperfect and the open-ended.