Sometimes I get lucky. I often draw in black acrylic on rolls of lining paper, cut and taped to an A2 drawing board. It's my bread and butter process. I start in one corner of the page and work across the page until it's covered.
I'll usually have a very basic, imprecise plan but the objective when I draw, is just to draw. It's not about creating a finished work of art. It's play and play is always for it's own sake, never for an outcome. This time the plan was simply to leave some areas of untouched white space. When a drawing is finished, I stick it up on the wall of my studio and there it will stay until I need the space for another drawing. When I stuck this drawing on the wall, I was very pleasantly surprised, even delighted by the result.
Delight is a rare thing for an artist. Whilst doing the drawing, I hadn't stopped to appraise my progress. I had no sense of whether what I was doing was going well or badly. As I've said, I wasn't setting out to create a work of art. But I got lucky. The three white spaces somehow created a beautiful dynamism. One of my best ever compositions I think. If any of the white spaces had been significantly bigger or smaller, or one too close to another, it wouldn't have worked. Who knows how, but the spaces I left on the page worked just so. Their downward movement, from left to right reminded me of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. A few days later I did a version with oil on canvas, with a some minor modifications:
It's true what the man said about trusting the universe. Start working in good faith, without intention and the universe will do the rest. Like it did for me that morning.
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