Controlled Chaos

By Mark Maguire
December 11, 2020
visuals
2 Comments

About the Artwork

“This piece was created with pastels. It is an illustration of the my feelings in the time of COVID, a time marked by a lack of consistent and concrete schedules combined with increased responsibilities and stressors.”

Mark Maguire

Mark Maguire is a fourth-year LGBTQ+ medical student and aspiring emergency-medicine physician. He spends his free time exploring nature, staying active and reflecting on experiences through art and the written word.

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2 thoughts on “Controlled Chaos”

Alan Blum
December 24, 2020 at 12:39 am

I echo Jill’s admiration. Cy Twombly’s large white gestural paintings at the Menil Collection in Houston have always intrigued me–indecipherable child-like scrawls, scribbles, and splotches, to be sure–but the artworks as a whole are animated and timeless. In “Controlled Chaos” Mark Maguire confines agitated Twombly-like shapes in separate pens, capturing the fear, stasis, and loneliness that so many of us are now feeling…and that so many others have felt long before COVID-19.

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Jill
December 12, 2020 at 6:59 am

What a fascinating piece because of all it says and leaves without saying. I admire its 1) composition, 2) conceptualization, 3) apparent simplicity, 4) the medium. You leave just enough air around each discrete entanglement to give it oxygen, focus, and humanity. I hope the artist will continue to draw even beyond the time-of-COVID.

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