I sometimes use woollen threads.
Wool has always been the material of my childhood.
My hand finds in it a softness older
than my memories.
When I let a thread hang down from my
drawings, I am not trying to add a material.
I simply let the line continue
on its way.
I refuse to let it stop at the edge of the paper.
The thread makes visible what I feel when I
draw: the sheet ends, the line continues.
It may disappear at the edge of the paper and
reappear elsewhere, on another sheet.
In between, I continue to see it.
The threads are turquoise.
Then the blues arrive.
Water blue, light blue, deep blue, the blue
of the ocean.
The blue of the abyss, abyssal blue.
Each shade opens up a new depth.
The blue covers nothing.
It invites you in.
Even before I open my sketchbook, I already feel
the absence of the drawing.
The void always precedes the first stroke.
It returns every day with the same certainty.
Then the pencil touches the paper.
My breathing slows.
Time disappears.
My hand becomes a sailing boat.
I no longer really steer its course.
The wind decides with me.
The sheet receives this movement for
a while.
Another sheet receives it next.
The format changes, the paper changes, sometimes the
gesture does too.
Yet I do not start afresh.
I carry on.
The ink opens up a passage.
The paper becomes the only territory where I finally cease to feel separated from the world.
There I hoist the flag of colours.
I dream that it will be visible from afar, that music
will wrap itself around it, that the notes
will become lines.
Then my whole body enters the drawing.
Something vibrates in my head, travelling down
to my very core.
A smile appears, and tears too.
They belong to the same joy.
Pleasure becomes desire, desire becomes impulse,
impulse becomes necessity.
I look at my drawings one after
the other.
They are on different sheets of paper.
A line disappears, a colour returns, a
movement resumes.
I do not see them as a succession
of finished drawings.
Each sheet is merely a stage in a
drawing that continues.
I no longer need to search for the lines.
They already know where they’re going.
I go along with them and finally realise that
I’m not drawing just to fill a sheet of paper.
A sheet of paper has a boundary. A drawing does not.
When I stop, something remains
unresolved.
The line may resume elsewhere, on another
sheet of paper, in another drawing.
I don’t always know in what form I’ll
find it again.
The next drawing doesn’t start afresh.
It carries on.
I could carry on like this without ever reaching the
last page.
