A face, a city, the angle of the light.
Some things return first as a line on paper.
View full drawing ↗This was the drawing I kept turning upside down. Each time I thought I had found the horizon, another part of the city insisted on being above it. In the end I chose a viewpoint that a reader could understand, knowing that the choice would make the place look more ordinary than I remembered.
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View full drawing ↗I began this page after the conversation in which Sael showed me the shore. The first face I drew was much too calm. It looked like an idea of wisdom, which was not what I remembered. There had been a small strain around her mouth and an expression I understood, briefly, as grief. Those were the things I wanted the second study to hold.
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View full drawing ↗The window frame was the easiest part to draw because I could look at it again in daylight. The figure beside it was more difficult. I worked from the room outward: the sill, the folds of the curtain, the plant whose leaves leaned toward the glass. Giving the remembered visitor a precise place to stand seemed more useful than beginning with her face.
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View full drawing ↗I made the leaf studies before attempting the garden. Their edges were the only part of the place I could remember without feeling unsteady. The leaves seemed glasslike, but not brittle. Fine branching veins caught light in a way graphite cannot reproduce, so I used differences in pressure to mark where their structure became visible.
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