Daily drawing 4-9-2018: Jasmine. Dip-pen

This is a drawing of a type I think of as ‘walking the tightrope’: start, keep going, keep going, keep going, finished. (As Klee famously said, ‘taking a line for a walk’.) Drawing this way feels trancelike. If you stop, you risk losing your flow and / or losing your way in the maze of detail. (I have a theory that botanical drawing provides the perfect level of complexity: only just graspable by the human mind. Drawings like this were traditionally a form of study. Every shape, every juncture, the particular texture of leaves and petals, every detail must be attended to in order to render with accuracy.)

When I was at high school and design school I was always in trouble for my attachment to drawing with line, but once I reverted to doing what I wanted without anyone watching, I realised that pure line is my language and my love. I love it for the same reason I love most of the forms I gravitate towards: it combines formal simplicity with technical challenge.

Another note about this drawing: my daily drawings often have encoded personal meanings— I’m not sure if they’re VISIBLE to others but I do feel they lend a drawing potency. This one was made in a Bad Time and I can feel in it my desire for a brief respite from thinking.

My favourite thing about it, though, is the effect of the glitchy nib, the way it randomly blots, fattening a single line or bridging the narrow gap between two parallel lines; not to mention that compositionally perfect ink-drop!