composition or content

There are people who keep commonplace books for their compositional and calligraphic beauty. Other people will scrawl over the pages or paste in clippings askew, concerned only with the quality of the content they’ve captured.

vision shifted

“White writing” appeared in my art the way flowers explode over the earth at a given time. With this method I found I could paint the frenetic rhythms of the modern city, something I couldn’t even approach with Renaissance techniques. In other words, through calligraphic line I was able to catch the restless pulse of our cities today. I began working this way in England—in Devonshire in 1935—when I returned from the Orient, where I’d studied Chinese brushwork. So in gentle Devonshire during the night, when I could hear the horses breathing in the field, I painted Broadway and Welcome Hero. In the process I probably experienced the most revolutionary sensations I have ever had in art, because while one part of me was creating these two works, another part was trying to hold me back. The old and the new were in battle. It may be difficult for one who doesn’t paint to visualize the ordeal an artist goes through when his angle of vision is being shifted.

—Mark Tobey, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists (Da Capo Press, 2000), interviews by Katherine Kuh.