The Failed Drawing
Now torn to pieces and the pages of this book.
It was tightly rolled stuff wrestled flat against the wall
with considerable amounts of masking tape and tacks.
I scratched out marks with swinging arm
hoping for clouds but rendering instead
dark heavy nests of lines.
I wanted a depiction of lightness
but the paper would not forgive
the combat of my strokes.
It didn’t want to be a surface,
knowing itself to be an object.
It reminded me by dropping to the floor
whenever my back was turned,
rending dents and tears.
After weeks of this I finally relented
and tore it to bits.
Not a drawing now but a thing a page a book.
The trespass of pencil and erasure,
just patterns across pulp and grain,
the coat of a beast too large to see.
2019
Approx. 9 x 22 inches when open
8 x 4 foot drawing ripped up and bound into a book. The text is a prose poem about the transformation from drawing to book as an allegory for the creative process.
Paper, graphite, painter’s tape, coptic binding, type-written text, 23 pp.