The following are quotations recorded in the artist's diaries and on her studio walls that were displayed in the 2011 exhibition 'Into the Mind of the Painter'



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The scribble is the artist’s fundamental rhythm.

Richard Leeman, Cy Twombly: A Monograph. (2005)


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Emotive tones and suggestive forms … make visible the invisible currents, which move through the time and space of a psychological landscape, a charting of the labyrinth of existence.

Suzanne Delehanty,‘The Alchemy of Mind and Hand’ in
Cy Twombly: Paintings, Drawings and Constructions 1951 to 1974. (1975)

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I think of Pollock as being the artist who managed, in the great work, to leave behind the need to make a symbol or an image.  What he was left with was about energy and space and just being.

The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell

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Only dead paintings are executed.
  Living ones come into being.
  They are a record of decisions;
  the sum of actions taken and reactions to them,
  of judgements made and of reconsiderations and revisions that those initial judgements prompt.

Painting is process;
  painting is doubt;
  painting is the suspension of disbelief
  and the physical affirmation of formal and material intuitions for which there is no prior justification.
  Painting is what painters do while others argue about painting.

 Robert Storr, Cage: Six Paintings by Gerhard Richter (2009)

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The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.

Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984)

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  The problems of inventing a new language are staggering but what else can one do if one wants to express one’s feelings precisely. …The interest in language so dominant in Modern art is not an interest in semantics per se: it is a continual interest in making language (whatever the medium) to fit our real feelings better.
  (1965)

The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell

 
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  Expressing nothing but himself, totally – that is the fluctuating rhythm, contradictory, secret and esoteric, of the creative act.

  Pierre Restany quoted in Richard Leeman, Cy Twombly: A Monograph. 2005


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…Modernists look with horror at the proliferation in modern culture of both fantasy and realism…not out of a puritan disdain for the imagination or the craft of letters, but out of respect for the world.

In our modern age, an age without access to the transcendental and therefore an age without any sure guide, an age of geniuses but no apostles, only those who do not understand what has happened will imagine that they can give their lives (and their works) a shape and therefore a meaning, the shape and meaning conferred by an ending. The task of those who have grasped the implications of this will be to try and bring home to those who haven’t what it is that has been lost.

…in a world without authority, each of them [artists] has to find his way for himself. No one can do it for them. Each new attempt as Eliot wrote in what could almost be described as a manual of Modernism, the Four Quartets,
 
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate.
  With shabby equipment always deteriorating
  In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
  Undisciplined squads of emotion.
    
Always precise though, he adds that we must not thereby be discouraged:
       
  For us, there is only the trying.
  The rest is not our business.

Gabriel Josipovici, Whatever happened to Modernism? (2010)


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It’s instinctive in a certain kind of painting, not as if you were painting an object or special thing, but it’s like coming through the nervous system. …it’s not descriptive, it’s happening. The feeling is going on with the task. The line is the feeling, from a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning. …It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture. So I’ve never had anyone around. I never have…I have to really be with no interference. And it takes me hours… the sitting and thinking…


Interview with Cy Twombly, 2000, in David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists (2001)