Cy Twombly emerged as a major color field artist, although there are a lot of action painting elements in his works. He first began his studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before transferring to Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. By 1950 he was working and studying in New York at the Art Students League before, again transferring to the Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he studied under Robert Motherwell, Ben Shahn, and Franz Kline. in 1952, he and close friend, Robert Rauschenberg traveled to South America, North Africa, Spain and Italy.

As Twombly’s career advanced and as he gained knowledge through his experiences, his distinct style emerged. Through a series of symbols, words, numbers, and images, he would communicate to the masses. High fassion designer, Proenza Schouler, used fabrics inspired by Twombly's work. The flat treatment of picture plain was his preferred handling the surfaces of the paintings. "The form of the thing is more interesting to me than color. I take the ­color as primary, like, if it's the woods, it's green; if it's blood, it's red; if it's earth, it's brown…My line is childlike but not childish. It is very difficult to fake.. to get that quality you need to project yourself into the child's line. It has to be felt." His rendering space was inspired in part through his admiration of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Although his work has a look of quick application, it is extremely well planned. "When I work, I work very fast, but preparing to work can take any length of time. It can even be a year." Many of his artworks remind me of a mad scientists notes.  Its is a random jotting of names and numbers that mean very little until discovering the thread that ties it all together. Some have also compared it to a Rothko painting in a blender. Maybe there was a link to his art and his work for the army. In 1953, at the end of the Korean war, he worked as a cryptologist. A cryptologist is a decoder skilled in analyzing codes.

A prime example of his work is Untitled, created in 1957. I discovered this work on my 2010 visit to Spain at the Reina Sofia. In this work, as is common, his gestural writings are converted into artworks that go against all the rules of painting and disregard the traditions of painting how-to. His art is more like street graffiti in its mesh with the everyday than that one first think of as painting.