“The mirror of art into which Hérodias gazes...
...with such anguish engendered in [Martha] Graham herself a fear of beginnings — fear of the unknown, the empty page or study, the inception of a new work: “the fear we all have, the fear of the artist, of a blank white page when writing a composition, the fear of the empty studio when starting a dance.” [...] Mallarmé wrote of his own trepidation in 1864 when he began writing: “With a sense of terror, for I’m inventing a language which must of necessity burst forth from a very new poetics, which I could define in these few words: paint not the object, by the effect it produces”. (79)
[Robert] Motherwell [...] wrote of his own response to the blank canvas that he needed to get it dirty before restoring “an equivalent of the original clarity and perfection of the canvas that one began on.” Barthes underlines the importance of the blank surface — and its sullying — when he writes that the elements in a Twombly painting “are separated from each other by space, a lot of space.” (80)