invention of flatness...

Drawings must feel to the pen like one long, long line. There are variations in speed and direction and there is the occasional leaving of the page... but after all... the single nib of the fountain pen creates a line. This is what it is engineered to do. Then there is the paper... the good sheet of paper is ready to accept the ink flowing from the nib of the pen from edge to edge, from corner to corner... both sides. The Camera Lucida projects two images at least, at the same time, all the time. The flowers have been cut away from their roots. They are in water, yes, but they are bound to die... they project a multidimensional, ever changing image... so incredibly complex and so simple at the same time... It is a choice to align all elements in a way that projects the image of the flowers in a best way into my eye, so my brain can be fooled into seeing the image of the flowers on the ready and white paper, and so the nib of the pen can be made to draw its so reliable line in ways that somehow play with the projected image. And so the flowers are dying, I see them die on paper, which is ready to take on the ink, flowing from the tip of the nib of the reliable pen. Over and over and over again, until the drawing is complete and is actually very much an invention that has traces of flowers and ink and paper in it... But omits so much, and is adjusted in ways, so it matches a hidden image, the one that I wanted to have, the one that I did not want to just go away. And because I want the line to be line and the paper to be paper and the reflection to be just the starting point for a drawing, and because I do not want to draw an illusion that has much to do with the variety of brightness on the flowers...a sense of depth is reduced. The drawing is flattened, it does not pretend to be flowers. It is a drawing, a precise drawing that happened to be created in the presence of flowers... And every single line receives the same level of importance... (and even if some end up seemingly more important, they are all the same to the pen...) Because I am the film, I can be more selective and more discriminating and more inventive than layers of chemicals on a transparent carrier... and also more selective than a CCD... and I am so incredibly slower and less precise as well... and I am so incredibly linear... I have to guide and unite and rely on tools that are only able to perform quite primitive tasks... very well... And this is such an incredible adventure... and I am really so bad with words, when they are supposed to be used to describe something that was not really meant to be described with words, because the result of the task, or the task itself is supposed to be the description... and I most often feel like the pen, seeing only the line... or the paper, ready to accept the ink or like the camera, just projecting information without being aware of the duality of it and like the plants... cut off the infinite chain, to die. hopefully gracefully... hmm... .