Drawing

‘I prefer beginnings over endings even if those endings may be the instigators of dreams, visions or hallucinations that initiate new ideas. Early morning is my time.

I have been thinking about drawing a lot in the past few weeks, specifically about the limits of drawing. A recent experience working with a glass-blower on a series of ‘free-blown’ glass vessels has been instructive. Drawing could only establish parameters, maximum height, girth, opening size. Any other considerations could not be drawn, modeled or rendered. The complexity or simplicity of the production process, depending on how you look at it, dismantled the efficacy of drawing. The ancient combination of heat, breath and touch is defined by a rather specific calculus that is marked by the dynamic interdependence of the measurable and the immeasurable. There is only so much that can be measured with calipers, in the heat of the studio.

I have become fascinated by approximation as a principle, and working without drawings; where the rules that shape an object are expressed in terms like this — overall, ‘please make it so that it is roughly x across and y high’, ‘any part of the surface area can be deformed except the top’, or, close up, ‘drill one hole anywhere as long as it is not in the center’. When working with highly skilled craftsmen, as I have been, this can be very satisfying. But, skill can become an issue that demands another rule, perhaps: ’please make sure that this line is never vertical’. Now that can be difficult, because most people will assume that it is important that the job is done well, that accuracy and similarity are important. Courting diversity is harder than you might think. That an object might be perfectly wrong, a bit ‘off’, with faults or deformations of character, that families of objects might be recognized for their differences as well as their similarities, that neighbors might turn away from each other, while others embrace, requires a shared sensibility that, informed by knowledge and experience, remains open to variation; serendipitous but never accidental, serene.

It is early morning. April. I am in Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, looking out of the living room window, watching the unseasonal frost glistening luxuriously. As the sun rises and the grass warms, the frost melts. Tiny droplets of water roll down the blades of grass, some evaporate. The shadow line and frost, out of step but connected, are drawn together.’