Energetic

This one sits on dark blue card, which does more of the work than anything I put on top of it. Everything is drawn onto that ground — reds, yellows, white — and because none of it is drawn over white, the colours behave differently. They come forward. The card holds them up.

It felt like confetti at a party. Not the tidy kind that gets thrown once, but the state a room is in half an hour later, when everything is still moving and nothing has settled. Bands sweeping through the middle, zigzags massing at the top and bottom, and scattered all over it the short dashes and small ringed dots that behave like the last things still falling. The whole surface is busy in a way I didn’t plan for and wouldn’t have known how to plan for.

What I like about it is that it reads as three-dimensional and is nothing of the sort. There’s no shading in it and no perspective. Everything sits flat on the card. The depth comes entirely from lines crossing and bunching and thinning out — some passing in front, some running behind, all of it just ink in one plane. Your eye does the rest. I only found that out by making it.

It comes from the same place as the others in this series. A small set of decisions at the start — the ground, a few colours, a handful of marks I let myself use — and then repetition. The restriction is the point rather than the obstacle: I couldn’t have got to this by having more options, only fewer. Keep to a simple rule for long enough and something turns up that you couldn’t have predicted from the rule itself, and couldn’t have reached by aiming at it. That’s the part I’m after. This one just happens to be loud about it.