Daily Mark Making Exercise

I have loved the work of Cy Twombly for a few years now, since I saw his work Untitled (Bacchus) in the Tate Modern. That lead me to looking up more of his work and I fell in love with it. I love how gestural his work is; how the sense of the act of painting it comes through. It feels like there is so much movement in his work. I particularly like how, even when he doesn’t use words, the mark making look like writing.

I really want to work like that, because I love it so much, but I find myself often quite heavy handed in my painting and mark making. A few months ago I started experimenting with a more minimalist approach to my art (which you can read about here) which I loved the results of, but I have found it difficult to move away from my tendency to over paint (although I have incorporated ideas from that into my work now).

I decided to commit to a new approach of work and do a daily mark making/scribble project. I put a piece of A3 paper on my wall and every day I would add to it with whatever medium I had closes at hand. I tried not to be too precious about it, the goal was not to make it into a work of art, but rather to just get me trying it as a way of working.

Although the final result is much more cluttered than I’d like, there are interesting moments that have happened on the page where different mediums and lines have interacted. I wish I’d made a note of how I made some of these marks or what I’d used, because I really like how they have turned out and would like to replicate them. But it was about trying something new and getting me out of my comfort zone and the practices I normally use to create art.

I would really recommend it as a quick and easy exercise to do. It doesn’t need any thought or planning. In fact, the aim is not to think or plan it!

An extension of this might be to create small, unfinished pieces of art (e.g. paintings, collages, mixed media work, whatever you are most comfortable with) and to add a mark or embellishment to one of them each day. I think that would be a real test for me – surrendering work that may have potential to a random thoughtless scribble one a day for a whole month!