You have to be – in a sense – in touch with your emotions, or just have knowledge of past artists who were strictly about conveying emotion (whether through the visual plane or metaphysically). Figures such as Caravaggio, Goya, Van Gogh, Rothko are all folks that virtually had the same mentality that Twombly had.

I remember feeling curious but essentially unpersuaded by seeing Twombly’s work in reproduction in college. Late in my undergrad season I went on a trip to the Menil and got to see their Twombly collection and was completely floored. I feel like the AbEx crowd that preceded him were interested in big gestures and that he was more interested, in his painting, in the accumulation of small gestures. The compartmentalization of action and consideration in his development of an image, balancing the specific with the gestalt, that I find really spectacular. And the personal poignancy of some of the imagery and the text, the moroseness of it, I find really moving.

His sculptures, with their decrepitude and ancientness, and their singularity (so very different from the qualities I described above in his paintings), I really love.

Twombly’s work had a really important effect on me for a long time.