She smiled on me as I looked out the window

I have been reading Daisy Hildyard’s ‘The Second Body’ — essays on the body we live in and how that body leaks into and absorbs the world around us. The book speaks of boundaries and the unbound.

I am a little over a week out of surgery. A drawing I began before going into hospital sits on the easel. I had worked two, perhaps three hours on it, laying down charcoal, rubbing it into the paper with my palm and fingers, feeling how the materials worked together and watching darks slip to light as my touch gave way to the grain of the paper. Touch makes of all drawings a body; drawing is as much a sensual as a visual act.

Standing close to the easel, I experienced the soft diffusion of pressure from my fingertips as it reached out to the paper. I saw landforms, faces, things melding one into another. Some I preserved. I watched. I waited. I stopped.

The drawing remained on the easel for a week before my operation. I looked at it from time to time, remembering what I had seen and felt as I worked, wondering whether or not it was finished. I wonder whether a drawing is ever finished.

When I look at clouds, I see forms, faces. Perhaps we all do the same; perhaps not. We navigate the world through pattern. If we stop to look, patterns emerge. Watch a cloud; look at the pattern of linoleum on a floor, the trunk of a tree, the grain in a plank. Given time, something begins to emerge. A face, a body — we see something that wasn't there before, or perhaps was there all along, waiting for us to notice it.

What we see is a field of possibilities. I think about this when I look at my drawings and wonder why I stop when I do. I don’t set out consciously to create this field. I draw because it is in me to draw. I look. I make a mark. I look again. Forms appear and disappear. Sometimes I follow them; sometimes I leave them alone. Drawing is like looking into mist. I don't always know what I am looking at, or what it might become.

Looking again at the drawing, one week on from my operation, I realise that I stopped working on it not because I felt it was finished, but because, in that moment, I sensed that it could go elsewhere, and I didn’t want to constrain where it went.

How solid, how certain, I wonder, does a drawing need to become before it can begin to become something in the mind of the person looking at it? How much needs to be there before someone is willing to stop before it as though before a cloud and give it time?

When I think about drawing, I am reminded of reading, of how what I read becomes less words than places, people, weather: a world that I experience like a film inside my head. This is what can make an actual film of a book so disappointing. The characters, places and events are rarely quite as we imagine them. Perhaps what I’m looking for when I draw is, in some strange way, the same thing a writer seeks when writing a book: to offer enough substance to hold someone’s attention, and enough white space not to determine what they see.

She smiled on me as I looked out the window

Withholding the name