a process that works itself

One of the things I'm observing as my content arises is different qualities of line, and I often wonder about the processes of control or otherwise over such qualities. When I'm not thinking at all, doing something like trying out a pen, images appear that wouldn't have come from a different frame of mind.

Below is one such pen-trying-out image. I would never have made this if I'd had any even partial thought of 'maybe selling' or even  'maybe sharing'. Both the line and the use of colour were made pretty much without thought.

The second image below has some of these qualities but not others. It wasn't intended to become an image that might be sold or shared. It was an experiment on canvas, a material which is still new to me, especially when using a pen. But though I had no plan for the image before I started and no idea about how it would turn out,  I was very conscious of the line moving more slowly and carefully on this more permanent material.

I have to acknowledge that I made a whole lot of similarly experimental images in my first years back at painting, and many of them ended up being exhibited and sold. Much of what I currently sell or share follows the same process of experimentation; of trying not to think, hoping to surprise myself etc, and it's only afterwards that I select.

The qualities that most interest me appear much more in the first of the two images above than in the second.

Some people might say that what I'm doing are 'studies'. But studies for what? If if I find that the freer, less intentional drawings have the qualities that I want, and the more conscious ones usually don't, what would I be making studies for?

All of my working is a kind of learning-by-doing. The qualities of materials that I want to learn about can't be understood in any other way. To some extent it doesn't really matter to me at the moment what image arises, or what colours and marks end up on the page. The main thing is just to keep making lines and putting on paint. Something emerges, moves and grows, just in the act of keeping going.


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