Withholding the name

I did not intend to draw.

I walked into the studio, saw an oak-gall ink drawing of a face on the wall, saw the ink and started to draw.  Myself.  Repeatedly on small squares of paper — looking in the mirror.  Things happen.

A sheet of paper sits waiting on a board.  I reach for the board.  Put it on the easel and draw.

Loosely, with the side of a piece of charcoal, I sketch out eyes — run lines around them.  The movement becomes more vigorous. Eyes join to eyes join to nose and a face appears.  It reminds me of the helmet dug up at Sutton Hoo and I wipe it.

Grey ground.  Streaks of line running through it.

I turn the board upside down and what remains of the eyes sits like pools two-thirds down the paper.  They become a ridge, become body, become sea.  Swollen.  Massive.  Beyond, a line from the face becomes mast and I rub at the paper — bring the white to a sail. I guess this is what my eye’s life brings to me.

The drawing becomes an attempt to capture the turmoil of sea.  Rubbing at the paper, the sail vanishes — is lost in an ever widening arc of white that might be a far wave spilling itself against a headland.  I reach for red charcoal, bring it down from the top of the sheet.  It warms the paper.

I begin to name what I see and both describe and resist describing it.  In doing so, I am caught between two languages and two ways of seeing: the sea worked with line; beyond it a field of tone.  To reconcile the breach, I pull marks from one language into the other and there I lose the drawing.