Leaving Things Unnamed

I rarely turn on the television. I don't keep music going through the day either.

It isn't that I push them away on purpose. I simply end up with hours when I see nothing and hear nothing. Charcoal dust still on my fingers, sitting in a chair, doing nothing in particular.

In those hours I let my attention drift over whatever is inside me.

Sometimes another person's words or work show me something I had not noticed. A sensation I could never quite hold takes on an outline through someone else's sentence. That happens, and I am grateful when it does.

Still, now and then I wonder whether the understanding arrives too early.

When I borrow a word that already exists and fit it to something that has not yet taken shape in me, I start to feel I have understood it, and I stop looking. What was vaguer than that, harder to explain, gets packed into a phrase that is easy to read.

My own perception is weaker than I assume. The moment I meet someone else's answer, I put on the face of a person who thought so all along.

So in the hours when nothing arrives from outside, I leave the things that have not become words where they are.

Why does that one expression stay with me? Why do I think the same thought over and over. What am I actually trying to see.

Nothing becomes clear. I just carry it.

That time and the time I spend in front of the paper run together somewhere.

Before I begin drawing there is a vague image. It has almost never ended the way the image promised.

The way the dust spreads when charcoal touches the paper. The black that stays after erasing. A line I did not intend. Pulled along by them, something that was not there at the start slowly comes into view.

As I follow those changes, I lose track of what I meant to draw.

Even so, far from the first image, an expression appears that belongs to that drawing alone. It differs from the plan, and yet it sits closer to what I feel. That moment.

Making work, then, is probably not the act of transferring a finished picture from my head onto paper. Rather than giving form only to what I knew beforehand, I use the drawing to find what I do not yet know.

To do that, I sometimes have to let go even of my own judgment and keep watching what is happening in front of me.

My drawings do not begin with a large statement addressed to the world.

Why was I drawn to this face? Why did I want to keep this shadow. Why do my eyes stop at an image where quiet and chaos exist at once, rather than one that is neatly arranged.

All of it is personal, and from the outside these may look like small problems. For me, though, drawing begins when I refuse to overlook that small discomfort.

If it could be said in words, there would be no need to draw it. Because I cannot explain it well, I keep testing it on paper.

A photograph, or the thing itself, holds a form that does not change. The position of the eyes, the bone structure, the way light falls. To some extent these can be recorded.

The impression left inside me is far less accurate. Sometimes only the eyes remain strong. Sometimes I remember the darkness around a face better than the face. Sometimes what stays is not the form but the air that hung there.

While I draw, record and memory mix.

I follow the visible shape, deepen a shadow, erase part of it into the white space, add a movement that was never there.

What comes out of that is neither a record of the subject nor pure invention. It is the trace of what I saw mixed with what stayed in me.

I borrow objective form, and my own subjectivity works its way in. Either one alone falls short of what I feel.

Something disappears when I keep reality exactly as it is, and something else is lost when I distort it as I please. Moving between the two, I look for whatever refuses to become language.

Making work, for me, may be less about offering an answer to the world than about touching a question that keeps living inside me.

Drawing it solves nothing. Why I was drawn there sometimes stays unclear to the end. Even after finishing, something remains.

But while I am drawing, I cannot run from what I see, what I fear, what I want to keep.

It feels less like finding an answer than like standing in a place where there is none.

In the hours when nothing arrives from outside, I look at a sensation that has no name yet. Then, unable to explain it to anyone, I set down what I can nevertheless see, somewhere between the black and the white.

That repetition is what making work means to me now.

I want these drawings and words to travel openly, and to reach the people who may need them.

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