Drawing is similar to painting for
me, but each stroke often requires
several revisions, detours and passes.
A line rarely emerges from a
single gesture.
It is built up slowly through
successive layers.
I go back over it, I cover it up, I thicken it,
I shift it by almost nothing. What appears
to be a single line contains several gestures
and several moments.
As in painting, I apply a colour,
then another, before returning to it once more.
A purple may sit alongside a blue, then a blue
that is lighter, a blue that is darker, before a
green comes along to rebalance the
whole.
I draw as I paint; I build up
layers just as much as I do colours.
All this build-up can fit within
the thickness of a single line. I do not necessarily fill in a surface: I construct the line as a narrow surface.
Each new stroke discreetly transforms the previous one.
One stroke remains beneath the next. A colour shines through the one covering it. An
earlier pressure alters the new one. Even
when a stage of the line is almost no longer
visible, it still contributes to what it has
become.
The line retains the time of its creation.
My hand, too, retains something
of the painting. It knows how to return, to cover,
to layer. It knows that a layer may
disappear from view without ceasing to act.
When I draw, this way of working
changes scale.
An operation that might have unfolded across an
entire surface is now concentrated within a few
millimetres. The layers no longer simply
construct an expanse. They construct
the thickness of the line.
The distinction between line and surface becomes
less obvious.
I can trace the edge of a line and discover
that it itself possesses depths:
colours that surface, different densities,
places where an old mark
reappears.
My gaze no longer merely follows the line.
It enters it.
I look at what is happening in the tiny space
created by the overpainting: what
remains, what disappears, what rises to the
surface, what a new colour reveals of
the one that was already there.
I can stay for a long time almost in the same
spot on the sheet.
My hand moves forward a few millimetres. The
drawing, however, continues to transform.
The line no longer moves in just
one direction. It moves within its own
depth.
I draw with lines, but some of them have become places.
I thought I’d left painting behind for drawing. I’m discovering that it has moved with me, right into the depth of the line.
