Published in a limited edition in 2024 by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Rob McDonald's monograph is accompanied by the essay “My time with Cy” and 67 b/w photographs, a selection from two portfolios from the Studio Notes series (2007-2020): Studio Still Lifes (2007-2008), taken in Cy Twombly's last studio in Lexington, Virginia, and Black Mountain College (2009), taken at the college and showing, among other things, the studio shared by Twombly and Rauschenberg during their student years.

The volume also includes the essays “An ordinary studio in Virginia” by Sam Stephenson and “Drawn to the details: Rob McDonald and Cy Twombly” by Thierry Greub; editorial notes, the acknowledgements, Greub's notes to the essay “Drawn to the details” and biographies of the authors.

The essay “My time with Cy” gives an intimate view of the time Rob McDonald and Cy Twombly spent together in Lexington, mainly in the artist's studio at 113 West Nelson Street, described by the author as “a visual wonderland reflecting Cy’s fondness for gathering and collecting. It was chock-a-block with jars and tubes of paints, bolts of canvas, very many books, and assorted treasures and curiosities picked from yard sales or antique malls – wooden apple boxes, unusual figures and forms, ornate frames, varieties of paper ephemera. There were sculptural works sitting about in various states of completion, almost as if they’d been left in distraction, but for a just moment.”

Sam Stephenson's text, “An ordinary studio in Virginia,” offers an outside perspective on the friendship between the author and the artist, as well as on the Lexington studio’s meaning, metaphorically and geographically, in which he notes: “McDonald’s quiet photographs, as with Dean’s subtle film, remind us that extraordinary things can happen in these places that are otherwise forgotten.”

Thierry Greub's essay, “Drawn to the details: Rob McDonald and Cy Twombly,” is a reflection on the artist's studio as a photographic motif by Sally Mann, Cy Twombly and Rob McDonald, who explored its nature in different ways: “Cy Twombly transformed his photographic motif past the tipping-point after which it remains recognizable only in its tiniest elements; Sally Mann transcends it to create a lucid aura. Rob McDonald does everything possible to lower the motif’s charge, to ‘downplay’ it, to understate it.”

Published in 2024 on the occasion of the exhibition Studio Notes - My Time with Cy at AnzenbergerGallery, Vienna (May 11 – August 18, 2023).

Studio Notes - My Time with Cy. By Rob McDonald. Text by Sam Stephenson. Essay by Thierry Greub. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2024. English edition.