Unparticled marks

A drawing is the sum of its loss.

This drawing was worked first from dust, and as I faced the paper I had no idea what I would do nor what the paper wanted from me.

I created a grey field.  On it I placed a figure -  lying down, head raised, one leg bent the other stretched out — left-right across the centre of the page.  No detail, just tone.  No idea why.

I blurred it with my fingers, with tissue.  The first death. Not sad — necessary.

Over it, I drew a series of vertical figures.  Men, women, children, burnishing them into the ground with tissue and then wiping across them left-right so that they were barely there.    Second death.  First arrival.

Over the figures I worked more people.  Different in scale, lending the forms some distance.  I distressed them again. They appear to me in that moment torn through as though caught in a sandstorm or mist.  Unparticled.  Bits drifting from their forms.  The third death.  Second arrival.

I might have left it there.

In a blur they vanish yet further. A dark line appears.

Three follow. Such is rhythm — dark verticals descend. 

Finding a home in landscape, figures reinsert themselves — two only — remembered through layers.  I work them with a charcoal pencil and work around them a dark mass.  Again I distress, both them and the mass.  They fade.  More dark brings them forward.

To me (and this doesn’t matter) they are a couple.  The mass a headland, the verticals presence: onlookers, perhaps — children, groynes, standing stones, what you will. The couple move towards something ill-defined.  They are surrounded by disappearance. I realise all this after the fact.

The drawing is called ‘The Walk’.

Traces of its passage remain.

The Walk. (2026). Charcoal on paper, 38 × 49 cm.