Drawing with blue and red

I began this drawing last Wednesday.

(I realize this is not the best of photos--so I will explain...and promise to post a better image when the drawing is complete.)

In sorting through the piles of collage material mounding all over my studio floor, I came across several pieces of paper--painted blue rather haphazardly on the front. I made them earlier this semester, and they were not to be used as images in and of themselves--but rather as color and texture for a wall-sized collage in progress. In their disuse however, they made their way to the bottom of my "blue" pile.

(I organize collage material in terms of color, and strangely I have a noticeable absence of purple--a color I cannot seem to bring myself to use much at all--in painting, drawing or collage.)

So I found these blue papers last week--and ended up being quite interested in their backsides. While these papers were drying--way back in September no doubt--their white backsides (their verso, eh) picked up residual ink from my studio floor--and an undulating, unpredictable, staggered periphery is the unexpected result on most of these papers. The one I chose to work with also has a squarish inset shape--again delineated by a staccato border. I do not know how that inset occurred.

I love the fact that residual mark left definitive shape and edge.
I love the fact that I MADE the shape and edge I just described--but I didn't know I'd made them until I happened upon the image last week. Indeed, discovering the paper felt like a delightful gift.

Now I know I've talked on this blog about not being able to really plan much of anything in my studio, but every so often I make an image that rather hands me it's definition right at the start. "This is what you will do." And then I go ahead and do THAT...whatever THAT happens to be. Oh, such clarity of direction is very, very rare, but last week I realized I had to take small pieces of red line (already made and nicely organized in my box of hand-made red lines labeled HUSKY) and rim the precarious edge of my blue tinged paper, a bit sporadically. So this is what I am doing, and I hope to finish the drawing tomorrow.

I don't know why I am doing this, but I know I must, and I really want to see what it all looks like in the end.