They are circles, lines, shapes—
imperfect ones.
I draw freehand, with a hand—
determined, though sometimes weakened by years
of work.
My left hand has slowly
changed.
Its fingers no longer unfold quite
as they once did. A curve has
set in. A tension remains. Something
has become ingrained in the very way
the hand holds itself.
It has curled up over the course of thousands
of drawings.
No single gesture is enough to explain this shape.
No single drawing can claim it. It is the result of
repetition, pressure, and the hours
that have accumulated. A transformation too slow
to be noticed whilst it was taking place.
Its long fingers bear the memory of
gestures that have shaped them.
This memory is also an imprint. It
appears in a joint, a crease, a
curve. Through constant repetition, the gesture eventually
sculpts the hand that performs it.
When I look at this hand, I already recognise
the drawing.
The drawing has a front and a back.
The front remains on the sheet of paper. The pressure of the
hand becomes a stroke, a line, a colour. The paper
retains what the gesture has given it.
The reverse side remains on the body. It is slower,
less visible. It settles in the hand, in
its tensions, in the position of the fingers.
My hand bears no resemblance to any of my
drawings. It reproduces none of their forms. It
bears the imprint of their repetition.
One gesture ends. Another begins. Then another.
Taken separately, each seems to
disappear with the line it has just produced.
Together, they form a duration that eventually
becomes visible in the body that
performs them.
The sheet retains the imprint of my hand. My
hand bears the imprint of the drawing.
I look at my fingers as if they were a material
slowly being shaped. The drawings are
scattered across sheets of paper, tidied away, moved,
sometimes forgotten. In my hand, their hours
have settled silently.
Its folds, its imprints, its lines
seem to continue their path across the paper,
as if the lines were born not on the
sheet, but in the skin.
The paper receives my hand. My hand receives the
paper. Between the two, the gesture passes, returns,
begins anew.
The hand draws.
The gesture repeats itself.
Repetition sculpts.
By dint of drawing lines, the gesture eventually
leaves its own line upon the body.
