In this essay, Visitation  (Jean-Luc Nancy), which I have been exploring for some time now, Nancy talks about painting – as painting (another visitation, another “site of conception”).   In fact, as I interpret Nancy’s words – he sees Pontormo’s work as pure painting, beyond its religious content: pregnant with birth – but another kind of birth – that is, of painting itself. “This mêlée begins and ends in the painting, and as a painting,” he says, describing the unfolding and the interweaving of color and cloth and light and figures.

I have been thinking about drawing – and what drawing as drawing would mean?  Cy Twombly comes to mind – mark, gesture, scribble, color, paint, texture, surface and script. No attempt at representation, yet his work is laden with references, to art history, to literature, to poetry. I think also of Elizabeth MacKenzie’s iPad work  (cf:  Scribbles  and other entries on her site). There too is the act of  pure mark-making. Even her portraits, dissolving in puddles of inky color, straddle the tense space between recognition of a face and the blur of ambiguity.

The text in the drawings below comes from the Coda of Nancy’s essay.

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