Drawing a Blank Again

Something of a ‘return to yesterday’ over the last couple of weeks, at least in terms of the production of the drawing presented here & the subject-object matter it represents: such revisitations, of varying degrees of fleetingness, seem of course to have constituted a significant part of the norm over the last year or so here at TOoT, in the ongoing search for a project of suitable definition & rigour with which to become productively engaged.


graphite & putty eraser/30x20cm

This object as actively contemplated & represented through the drawing process, then, harks back to October-November 2010 & the drawings of ‘blanks’, those folded & lightly crumpled sheets of paper devoid of any added surface content in the way of imagery or written or printed text, white monochrome low relief 3D objects subject to the play of natural light in the manner of any other.

This particular small piece of paper (which is serving as a bookmark as the reading of the Jasper Johns ‘Gray’ volume proceeds, with great interest & not without a certain relevance to this particular object & the drawing of), represented at a life-size scale, displays the traditional grid pattern as a consequence of the folding, creasing & unfolding to which it has been subjected, & a range of subtly-modulated tones across its surface, but also has a significance other than its object-quality, having a handwritten personal dedication on its verso, hints of which are visible through the surface as light passes fugitively through as well as across it, these being recorded accordingly as subtle-ish marks upon the surface.

Although this drawing was processed in nothing like as laborious a technique as the late-2010 examples (which also involved many a subtle wash of watercolour over the initial graphite foundations), still the difficulty of producing much work in the available daylight at this dark, gloomy, compromised time of year presented itself - progress was frustratingly slow & fragmentary, providing a reminder as to why the original series-as-potential-project was abandoned as being temporally untenable, however much one might be inclined towards & wish to subscribe to the concept & practice of the ‘slow life’: a caution, perhaps, against considerations of continuing such an endeavour now, when the imperative should be to draw as often & long as possible.