Some drawings burn

Self Portrait I began as observation and became about something inward. It was drawn quickly and when I took it off my easel it sat amongst other drawings before being tidied away and placed under a table where I keep paper I use for lighting the fire.

Like other drawings before it, it was destined for the flames, but when I saw it again I realised what I had felt at the moment at which I had stopped drawing: that it already said all it wanted to say. That it was enough. If I had seen it on a gallery wall with someone else’s name underneath it, I would have wanted to buy it.

When I look at it again, I recognise the person and I recognise some of the sites and movements that preoccupy me when I draw myself — my neck, my eyes, the misalignments, disjunctures. The drawing feels wholly mine, and yet there is also a part of me that feels that because it is so alive it must have been drawn by someone else.

In drawing myself, I am aware that I am looking at myself, but in that moment I am not trying to show myself. Very quickly I lose sight of the fact that it is myself I am drawing. The shift from observation to feeling happens upon me. The mirror remains, but the drawing becomes about arrangements of tone, structure and movement — arrangements understood through mood and in dialogue with the emerging drawing.

I become aware that the drawing is no longer of me. In an odd way this feels like failure, as though I had broken a contract. But I push beyond that and listen to what the drawing says.

My hand loosens, becomes freer, and the drawing gathers towards a whole.