Light breaking through spirals

This time there are two tasks. The subject is still the spiral. We’ll stay with the spiral, it’s too good to let it go already. But the theme becomes a little more concrete: the spiral as light. You’ll approach it as follows:
First, you draw a square on your drawing sheet. With a ruler. And within this square, you draw a spiral. It has one line. Only one line. Then you go into the square with a color of your choice, it can be black ink, or another tint, or charcoal or pencil or ballpoint pen. You go into the square with small strokes, which then blur into a surface, so even that only the line remains white. The background becomes dark. The spiral remains in the white of the drawing sheet. And then you confine this line as close as possible. You must frame the line from the left and the right with the color until only the spiral remains free. It would be nice if your square was quite large for the line to have enough space in it and so that you have room to go in between the lines of the spiral with your color. This is the first exercise.

The second exercise you’ll do on a second sheet. Again, you place a square on the sheet. However, this time, not in the center. And you don’t place the spiral completely inside the square, but it also goes beyond it into the remaining space of the drawing sheet. And then you work in the same way as in the first exercise: you make a surface of strokes, and the line of the spiral remains white. But outside the square, the line of the spiral will take on color. Namely the color you used for the surface inside the square.
So, the first task is pretty simple. The line of the spiral remains white. It’s about the spiral as an appearance of light. For the second task, the spiral is partly inside the square, partly outside, on the rest of the sheet. Inside the square the line remains free, outside the square it will take on the color your square got. It’s about the experience of a white line changing into a colored line. It doesn’t matter what color you use. But as strong a contrast as possible, that would be good. It can be black, blue, red, green. Then, the line outside the square vibrates, of course. It must continue to vibrate while becoming lighter and darker. Articulate these lines beautifully.

This is a simple yet very effective drawing task. You’ll see. You’ll get beautiful results that you can use again and again in other contexts. A line those changes from white into color or into black. It’s also a task that requires accuracy. You need to work very accurately to define the line that should remain white. When you are doing such precise work, it’s easier if you make small strokes with the brush, pencil, ballpoint, or felt-tip pen, not long, large lines around the line that should remain blank.
The colored area is defined with small stroke elements. That way you can observe very precisely how the area develops. And that above all everything becomes calmer. The mind becomes calmer. The hand becomes calmer. You can watch and see how it develops. And sometimes something develops that requires you to pause. That you have to say: “Ah, that’s interesting, I haven’t seen it that way yet. I’ll leave it like that now.”

Even though it may not have been the task at all. No matter. Just when you feel like “Now I’m going to stop”, maybe that’s the right moment to stop. When that impulse comes, you must stop.

Reworking something because you think you have to, that doesn’t help. You’ve lost something that you can’t get back. That often hurts. So be nice and careful with your work by consciously observing when you should stop. That’s exactly when the drawing is done. It takes a slower approach to do this.

This slow way of working also means that you can create a great depth in your power while working slowly for a while. By releasing this power, you can create wonderful drawings. That may be the next task or the next drawing. But I won’t name it, because you have to create it yourselves, very spontaneously and very freely. You don’t have to close your eyes at all, but allow a sudden explosion from this deep, locked-in energy. It will be very interesting, but I can’t predict what it will look like. I would just like you to observe yourselves in this introspection, generating power, working slowly and sliding into the spontaneous, into the intuitive.

As always, start your drawing session very consciously. Do yourselves good. Stretch beforehand and sit down consciously. From a position that means joy to you, joy to draw now.