Cy Twowbly and a French barrette
An older man with a French barrette stopped near me while I was viewing Cy Twombly’s works at the contemporary art museum in Berlin.
We began talking about Cy Twombly’s works.
It symbolizes the Tao, he said
How is that, I inquired
The Tao is the Zen way to guide human beings through life. It says that everything flows, there are no real borders between human beings and nations, the borders are only in each human being’s mind. There is neither beginning nor end not happiness nor is sadness, there is no definite good as there is no definition for bad. The bad of today can turn out to be the best of tomorrow.
But what has it all to do with Cy Twombly’s artworks?
This, he pointed at a big white canvas with 3 green lines on it, is creating out of emptiness.
What do you mean by emptiness?
it means forming a visual manifestation of what passes through the creator rather than what he is and what he feels at the moment.
Fullness carries all the weight of fears, inhibitions, moralities, beliefs, relations.
Emptiness is just a shade in the dark.
It is easy to detect Tao painters, they are not trying to impress, they are not trying to draw attention not to them nor to their artworks, they are not trying to fill all the canvas. Sometimes one line is enough to express the entire artist’s journey.
Have Tao in your life
Ted Barr
