Letter About Rocks #3, Blue Ground 2010

Brice Marden made this Letter About Rocks #3, Blue Ground, and it looks like he used wax crayon and graphite on paper. I love this piece because it feels like a reminder that art-making is a process, not just a product. The blue ground is so tactile, you can almost feel the waxy surface. Then these snaking lines of orange and black – they remind me of vines, or maybe pathways. I keep thinking about how each line is drawn deliberately, carefully, but at the same time they are all so loose and free. Look at the way the black lines sometimes wobble or thicken. It's not about perfection, it's about the hand moving, the artist thinking, and the eye seeing. Marden’s drawing feels like Cy Twombly's work; both artists leave you with a sense of something incomplete, like a thought still in progress. That openness, that ambiguity, is what makes art an ongoing conversation.