Coming up for Air

LBI #1, 2011
Watercolor pencils on paper
6"x6"
©2011NanciHersh

Recent down time at the beach gave me some much needed space.  I felt like I was finally coming up for air.  The weeks following Nate's accident were filled with doctors appointments for he and I, surgery, chemo, and just coping.  Beach - and water time were just what I needed to helped me remember to just be and experience the moment.

Cy Twombly passed away the day before I arrived on Long Beach Island and the New York Times featured a lengthy obituary on his long, and often misunderstood career.  What resonated most personally, was the following paragraph from the Times article:

In the only written statement Mr. Twombly ever made about his work, a short essay in an Italian art journal in 1957, he tried to make clear that his intentions were not subversive but elementally human. Each line he made, he said, was “the actual experience” of making the line, adding: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” Years later, he described this more plainly. “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture,” he said. The process stood in stark contrast to the detached, effete image that often clung to Mr. Twombly. After completing a work, in a kind of ecstatic state, it was as if the painting existed but he himself barely did anymore: “I usually have to go to bed for a couple of days,” he said.


Art as experience. The joy, the beauty, and often the agony is in the process.  Exhausting as it can be, it is what makes us artists, and human.