Getting Better, Getting Bored

There are stretches when the sense of improving and the sense of growing bored arrive together.

This is not the boredom of having lost interest. My hand moves better than it used to. Black lands where I want it, and the places I mean to break apart come apart. Even while I feel myself drawing more surely than before, something else creeps in, a sense of repeating what I have already done.

If the explanation were that the heat had gone out of it, something would not fit. A hand that has cooled does not move that quickly.

For a while I could not name what was happening. What made it clear was a single drawing of a cat.

I spread charcoal dust across the paper and build a large area of darkness first. The fur does not get placed hair by hair. Once the region where no light reaches is there, I start pulling the flow out of it with an eraser pen and a charcoal pencil. Lifting, laying down, lifting again. The fur emerges from the dark rather than being drawn onto it.

The stretch running from the back down toward the hips. Somewhere in there, my hand stopped hesitating.

This will work the way the last cat worked. Before that thought had finished forming as language, the eraser had already chosen its angle. Months earlier I had handled a similar passage on a different cat in a similar way. How hard to lift, how much to leave. Nothing was recalled. My hand simply knew it first.

And it worked.

What stayed with me afterward was not the quality of the drawing. It was that I never once hesitated.

Things used to go differently. After building the darkness I would stand in front of the paper wondering how to bring the flow out, my hand holding charcoal suspended in the air with no answer in it. I would try something, feel it was wrong, erase it, come back in from another direction. Those drawings look rough to me now. Still, there was a sensation of waiting for something to happen on the surface.

Now the answer arrives before the question forms.