The appearance of things

I’m looking at a pair of eyes — blue-grey turning green.  At the texture of skin, light falling on it.  My gaze drifts to a collarbone, the V of her neck, how tanned skin slips sand-coloured to brown.  I see slowly, blink occasionally, acknowledge the soft periphery — orange dress, forms through the window — return to the eyes, her smile.

There is something about this moment, about beauty, that makes me want to capture it and I reach for my phone.

The photo disappoints, in the same way that a photo of distant hills, of a horizon, of a particular light disappoints.  The eye sees over time.  A photograph records what we never in fact see.

And yet I take photos.

Recently, I took a series of photos of a charcoal drawing as I worked on it. I worked at an easel, a large sheet of paper taped to a board, the white of it inviting and forbidding action.  Paper is the sum of all possibles.  Everything lives in it and nothing can be seen.

I was thinking of an abandoned building.  Stone walls, slate roof, caved in — through its absences what lay beyond the house could be seen.  I made a mark.  A single line.  For a moment it existed as a drawing.

During the moment of drawing, the eye works with the paper, the hand and the medium in a peculiar quiet.  Mark, hand, eye, hand, mark, eye, hand.  The world closes in and then comes a wakening.  I struggle to put my finger on what causes it.

At such moments I take a photo of the drawing.  It is not a process photo.  I do not take it in order to describe how the drawing progresses from its start through to its finish.  I take it in order to keep what I know I will lose.

I could leave the drawing there, at the moment when it shows something half-formed that exists in its own right.  I do not know what gives it the quality of being a drawing rather than being a path towards a drawing.  I only know how it feels to stand in front of it, recognising it as a drawing and knowing that it will cease to exist if I move on.

Françoise Gilot recounts how Picasso would sometimes get her to make an exact replica of a painting when he felt that the painting itself had arrived at a point of logical conclusion whilst he himself had not.  He would pursue the new path as a different painting and keep both paintings.  If I could take a drawing from the easel and replace it with an exact replica and then work on the replica whilst keeping the first drawing I would.  But I have no way of doing that.  The photograph is my attempt at a substitute, yet strangely I know that over time I will not look at it.

In all, I took six photos, each as I awoke to what felt like a drawing.  Six drawings lost within other drawings.  I resist calling the final drawing a finished drawing.  It is a drawing that records a moment of withdrawal.  The paper it is on marks the permission to stop.