Excerpts from 2005 notes

The seen never is to become drawing.

***

Not a room containing a table on which rests an apple, but an apple with ‘roots’ stretching out becoming table and room. The whole space surrounding an apple born out of a point on the apple’s skin: impossible.

***

A drawing is in silence. When looking at drawing, I should start by noticing that the picture is a silent world, that silence emanates from it. Every colour, every shape, every mark, every image, etc. in the drawing is in silence, is within silence. I shouldn’t go any further before I've become fully aware of this.

***

At the core, my motive for drawing derives its energy from a faith. The same faith that Simone Weil had:

“I was sustained by the faith [...] that no true effort of attention is ever wasted, even though it may never have any visible results, either direct or indirect.”

As I write this, I can see a tree outside the window and I know that I could never make a drawing that surpasses its beauty. Why drawing then? The value of drawing is not in the results, that may never be visible, but in its being a true effort of attention.

***

I've always struggled with the term 'beauty' when applied to works of art. How can, for instance, Giotto’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ, in the Arena Chapel, be described as beautiful? How can the representation of such a sorrowful scene be described as beautiful?

'Beauty', in its everyday meaning, stems from the satisfaction of desire: the 'beautiful' is what gives pleasure. Giotto’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ doesn't give me pleasure. Yet, I find it profoundly beautiful. Why? Perhaps, because I give to the word 'beauty' a meaning similar to that defined by Simone Weil:

“The beautiful takes our desire captive and it empties it of its object, giving it an object which is present and thus forbidding it to fly off towards the future [the imagination].”

For Weil, to experience the beautiful one needs what she calls chaste, or pure love and:

“In this sense, and on condition that it is not turned towards a pseudo-immortality on the model of the future, the love we devote to the dead is perfectly pure. For it is desire for a life which is finished, which can no longer give anything new. We desire that the dead man should have existed, and he has existed.”

This instance of pure love, and thus of pure beauty, is alien to the idea of pleasure, understood as the satisfaction of desire. It is desire itself (arrested?).