I finally got to a point with this one where I was satisfied with how far I have taken it, although it is not finished, I need to move on to something new, the finishing touches can wait.
This was just about the most challenging drawing I have ever attempted. The subject, slate exposed in the banks of the Helford River, drawn on A3 in black fine liner.
Why was this so difficult? Well beyond the obvious large amounts of detail, it was difficult to draw something that had no definitive form. What I mean by this is that whenever I went to draw another rock, rather than knowing exactly where I needed to go on the page to draw what I had just been look at, I had to carefully make sure I was putting pen to paper in the right place, and vice versa when I went back to look at the subject to. This meant that every look and touch of the pen had to be thought about so much more than if I was drawing a more simple form with clearly discernible elements and fastest. This resulted in progress being very slow. But I persevered and here is the result of a lot of late nights.
Why did I want to draw this? Well, I spotted this slate wall in the river bank and the flowing pattern that the rock created in the river bank appealed to me and caught my imagination. I saw a connection between the flow of the river and the flowing appearance of the stone, which made me see that all things are in a state of flow or flux, some flow constantly over a short period of time, others flow slowly over millennia, or for eternity. The stone and the water have a symbiotic relationship, a joint state of flow, in that the water erodes and shapes the stone as it runs by, but the rock that forms the river banks and bed dictates the path of least resistance that shapes the river itself.
