Basking

Every line in this one is drawn twice. I’m not laying down a mark so much as drawing its two edges and leaving the black card showing through the middle, so what you’re looking at is really the outline of a line — the thing itself never gets filled in. It’s the same approach as the others in the series, but pushed somewhere quite different.

What it produced is a whole surface of interlocking shapes: loops, blobs, hooks, small enclosed rings, all of them threading over and under one another with nothing left empty. It looks alive. Cellular, or like something seen through a microscope — a slide of organisms packed together, each one distinct and all of them pressed up against their neighbours. I didn’t set out for that. It arrived because of how the shapes had to negotiate with each other.

The fun of it was in the decisions at each crossing. Which line passes in front, which one gets interrupted, which one carries on through and comes out the far side changed. Hundreds of small choices like that, none of them consequential on their own, and then a scene that reads as organised and connected — as though it had been mapped out beforehand. It wasn’t. It was built one junction at a time.

That’s the thing I keep finding across this work. A restriction that sounds like it should limit you — draw only the edges, keep to five colours, never let a line simply stop — turns out to open a much larger set of possibilities than working freely would have. Setting up the rule is the creative act; after that you’re exploring a world rather than inventing one. And it takes a long time to see what’s in there. This piece changed a great deal over the making of it, and since then I’ve carried the approach into digital drawings, where I’ve been filling in the shapes and adding shadow to them — the same structures, but solid rather than outlined.