Puddles

This one came out of the year-long sketchbook, from something as small as trying to draw circles. Not perfect ones — I was more interested in what happens when you draw a circle, then draw another around it, and keep going until the rings crowd up against their neighbours and have to decide what to do.

They multiply. Every size, from tight little coils upwards, in blue and green and yellow and white on black. A few of the circles are far larger than the page can hold, so all you get of them is a long shallow curve entering at one edge and leaving at another — you can’t see where their centres are, only that something bigger is passing through. Those are what stop it settling into flat repetition.

It looks like rain hitting the surface of water. Dozens of impacts at once, each one throwing out rings that spread until they run into the rings from every other, and the pattern in the overlaps belonging to none of them. In my head it’s also light — waves crossing each other across space, interfering, brightening and cancelling where they meet. Same behaviour either way, at very different scales.

Which is the thing I keep coming back to. Nobody designs the pattern on a puddle. One rule, applied over and over, and something intricate turns up that couldn’t have been worked out from the rule itself. That’s the bargain I’m making every time I start one of these: a very small instruction — draw circles, let them overlap, don’t stop — that contains the whole surface, and tells you nothing about what it’s going to look like.