120 COLOUR PENCIL DRAWINGS (Reflections)

In 2010 I brought a set of Faber Castell 120 Polychromos pencils, and they looked so good in the tin that I could hardly bear to disrupt them. The arrangement seemed so perfect. I remember asking myself how does one begin to choose colours from a range of 120 when one is not making a representation or using colour symbolically? So instead of making arbitrary decisions about which colour to use next another, I saw them as a kind of ‘readymade’, by using the order they are arranged in the tin, equally, without preference for one colour over than another.

The process was simple; on a drawing board with a ruler I would take one colour and draw a straight line and then another and then another, each time I would place the pencil I had just used on the other side of my work surface. After each drawn line, I would move the ruler down equal distance, once I had drawn all 120 colours, I would begin again. This time beginning from the opposite end of the palette, drawing between each of the previously drawn lines. This produced a kind of mirroring or reflection.

Once I had drawn all 120 colours twice, the drawing was finished and I would begin another. This time I would begin from a different place within the range, i.e. begin with pencil no 40, rather than pencil no 1, the next drawing would begin with pencil no 80 etc. It was a simple system and process that placed considerable emphasis on the elemental activity of placing one mark after another. As you observe the different line takes on different qualities, some colour pencils are harder or softer than others, they therefore either wear down as the pencil is drawn from left to right or they retain shape. For me it was an exercise in retaining even pressure for each line drawn.

Just prior to making these drawing I had been working on a project with composer Jamie Crofts whose method of composing his Chromatic Fields had a direct influence.