Grotesque Profile -Leonardo da Vinci,- The Scintillation of Delay in Drawing

Grotesque Profile Leonardo da Vinci, : Renaissance period  Drawing

 Pen and brown (iron gall) ink, and washes

 by

Leonardo da Vinci, Grotesque Profile, c. 1480–1490. Pen and brown ink with wash. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In observing Grotesque Profile, one immediately notices the slanting ink traces falling from upper left to lower right—the unmistakable evidence of Leonardo’s left-handedness. These strokes carry the residue of imagination, a lingering energy that still resonates across time. They scintillate with fluid assurance, born from an inner light that entered through the eye and was transformed, through studio praxis, into living matter on the page.

The drawing operates as a spatial translation of thought. Marks, washes, and forms are arranged with such restraint that even the negative space feels intentional. Leonardo understood precisely where a wash would bloom into its fullest expressive force. Here the work reaches a quiet apogee: a convergence of drawing system, imagination, and perception that transcends its materials.

The traces flowing from his goose quill reveal a refined aesthetic intelligence. The flexible nib responds to pressure with extraordinary sensitivity: a firm downward stroke asserts the weight of the elongated chin; a gentle release allows the line to taper into a near-evaporation. Such modulation requires neurological memory—forms transmitted from eye to hand through a disciplined nervous system. The drawing records this embodied perception.

Leonardo’s economy of line is mesmerizing. He pulls forward only what is structurally essential—the mandible, the cheekbones—with surgical clarity. The subtle wash beneath the chin conveys both gravity and deformation. In applying it, he accepted the risk of diluted pigment flowing unpredictably, yet he trusted his studio-honed instinct. He knew exactly how much was enough.

There is a quivering system within Leonardo’s practice that remains difficult to comprehend. Consider the few teeth in the mouth: seemingly minor, yet they function as anchoring marks that stabilize the entire image. Without that fragile constellation of ink, the drawing would lose coherence.

This observation supports a theory I call Forensic Rhopography—the disciplined act of looking at what is easily overlooked. It is a vital component of drawing intelligence, allowing the artist to recognize the precise moment when a work reaches its peak charge. In Grotesque Profile, Leonardo did not merely depict a face; he captured the scintillation of character through minute, peripheral details.

Drawing is never easy. To approximate the masters requires sustained looking—studying the works that contain the knowledge we seek. when visiting museums today, this mode of learning feels wanting, though it remains the engine of artistic imagination. It is within this interval of attentive delay—when the eye absorbs and translates—that imagination crosses into form. Leonardo understood this deeply. Here, drawing emerges not from speed or certainty, but from the patient cultivation of perception. Scintillation appears at the threshold between intensity and dissolution—the precise moment when seeing becomes matter.

The Epoch Without Time: Art as Spatial Interaction

 

egg still life II
oil wax acrylic on wooden panel
18 cm x 18 cm

In the Davidson Hypothesis, art does not unfold through time — it exists in space. Cause and effect are real, but they are local, relational interactions, not stages on a clock. Every mark, gesture, and pigment strike is a collision producing residue. The canvas is not a record of moments passed; it is a field of interactions.

At the heart of this process is Δs, the “Scintillation of Delay.” Δs is the charged interval between perception and action — a structural space where energy gathers before becoming form. The Scintillation — the slight tremor or vitality of the line — is the trace of this crossing, the material fingerprint of perception converting into mark.

Inside Δs lies Optical Jelly, the dense, reactive medium of sensation, memory, and expectation. It stores uncertainty as potential energy. When saturation is reached, the mark emerges as a fossilized residue of perception, not a depiction of the external world. Art is the crystallization of interaction, not the shadow of reality.

Even decay — pigment fading, paint cracking, canvas stretching — is a spatial event, not a temporal one. Residue persists because collisions have occurred. Each observer reconstructs influence differently, activating the work’s structure anew. Art survives in structure and interaction, not in the passage of years.

For the artist, intensity replaces duration. Saturation replaces labor. The studio becomes a laboratory of collision and conversion — a space where perception, material, and gesture meet to leave lasting residue. Each mark is a trace of potential released, a crystallization of energy, and a testament to what happens when the organism, material, and space collide.

Time is not a force. Only interaction and residue are real.

Patterns That Last

 

Peter Davidson - Stretching — In Space, Not Time

(Study of a hard working Japanese woman) 

Pencil, ink, felt tip pen, pastel on F2 paper

This essay applies concepts from physics to explore fine art. In my own painting, drawing, and broader praxis, I intentionally remove the element of time from observation and this is a work in progress

 

“Why Fine Art Persists as Spatial Structure”

When you look at a Leonardo da Vinci drawing today — perhaps preserved in a museum — you are experiencing something remarkable. The photons entering your eyes are entirely new, yet the influence of the artwork persists. How can something so old still affect you?

The answer is structure in space, not time. Influence does not travel through clocks or physics; it is embedded in spatial patterns that endure.

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1. Energy Meets Structure

Each photon interacting with your eyes carries energy:

$$E = h \cdot f$$

Where:

• $E$

  $E$ = energy of the photon

• $h$

  $h$ = Planck’s constant

• $f$

  $f$ = frequency of light

The photon’s energy is new, but the pattern of pigments and canvas remains the same. Influence persists through structure, not through temporal flow.

---

2. Structure Survives in Space

Why does da Vinci’s influence survive centuries?

• Pigment molecules stay in place.

• Paper or canvas resists decay.

• Museums maintain stability against environmental factors.

This persistence is structural, entirely free of classical time or academic theory.

---

3. Influence Depends on the Observer

Not every observer experiences art the same way:

• Humans perceive color, detail, and composition.

• Other species interpret light and motion differently.

We can express an observer’s experience as:

$$Influence_O \approx Structure_{art} + Interaction_{O,art}$$

The structure persists, while each observer reconstructs its influence differently.

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4. Decay as Spatial Interaction

When an artwork begins to deteriorate — fading pigments, fraying fibers — this is not the passage of time. It results from interactions in space:

$$New\ Structure = Old\ Structure + Influence_{environment}$$

Environmental factors like air, water, and light cause decay. Time is not involved; only space and relational influence matter.

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5. Space Over Time

Scientific models often impose temporal constructs because they are easier to measure, but this does not mean time is the most accurate or best way to understand fine art. A spatial-relational reading aligns more closely with how artworks actually exist and how aesthetic influence is encoded.

Even studies like Meng et al.’s, which describe the “temporal progression of aesthetic judgments” in dynamic generative art, can be understood differently: what they measure is an observation of relational change, not a fundamental property of the artwork itself. Art’s influence persists in its structure, and observers interact with that structure anew 

Meng, P., Meng, X., Hu, R., & Zhang, L. (2023). Predicting the aesthetics of dynamic generative artwork based on statistical image features: A time-dependent model. PLOS ONE, 18(9), e0291647. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291647 

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6. Putting It Together

• Space is primary: The pattern exists and persists.

• Influence flows from interaction: Observers and environment interact with the structure.

• Observers are unique: Each reconstructs influence differently.

Mathematically:

$$Influence \approx Spatial\ Structure + Observer\ Interaction + Environmental\ Interaction$$

What survives is the pattern itself, not photons or any temporal measure.

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7. Why This Matters

This perspective reshapes how we think about art and perception:

• Art is persistent structure, free from classical time and academic theory.

• Influence exists purely through interaction in space.

• Decay and disappearance occur because structures collide with environmental elements, not because “time passes.”

• Every work of art becomes a bridge across space — a timeless connection, reconstructed anew by every observer.

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Conclusion

Looking at a centuries-old drawing is not just observing ink and paper. It is experiencing timeless influence: a connection embedded in space, preserved in patterns, and flowing through relational interactions — entirely beyond classical temporal frameworks.

The Scintillation of Delay: An Observational Study

 

Paul Cezanne - The Garden at Les Lauves c1906

Phillips Collection

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_C%C3%A9zanne_-_The_Garden_at_Les_Lauves_(Le_Jardin_des_Lauves)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

The Scintillation of Delay: An Observational Study

This study does not emerge from art-historical interpretation but from direct studio practice. It is derived from observation within painting itself — from the lived mechanics of perception, hesitation, and inscription. Where art history describes outcomes, Studio Praxis seeks to describe mechanisms.

The most critical juncture in this system occurs at what I call the scintillation in delay. This is the precise, shimmering interval where optics meet material — the instant in which a spatial event is committed to a surface.

Painting is not simply representation. It is transfer.

Light does not arrive as image; it arrives as energy. Each photon carries energy proportional to its frequency:

E = h * f

(Energy equals Planck’s constant multiplied by the frequency of the light.)

When this energy enters the organism, it is absorbed and transduced. Chemical excitation becomes electrical impulse; electrical impulse becomes neural activation; neural activation becomes motor intention; motor intention becomes pigment displaced across a surface. The mark is therefore not a depiction of an object but the material residue of absorbed light.

Yet this transfer does not occur without interval. Between perception and inscription lies delay — however minute. Even within fractions of a second, the originating intensity begins to dissipate. Painters experience this not as theory but as difficulty: the subtle fading between seeing and marking, the loss of immediacy that occurs in recall.

This interval is where the scintillation appears. It is the apogee of perceptual charge — the peak moment before dissipation overtakes intensity.

In The Garden at Les Lauves by Paul Cézanne, this condition becomes visible. The painting does not record objects; it records the management of delay. Cézanne does not overextend the interval in pursuit of academic finish. He stops at the threshold — at the moment when perceptual energy remains alive. The unfinished edge is not incomplete; it is preserved intensity.

From studio observation, a consistent condition emerges: Conceptual Energy decreases as Temporal Delay increases. The originating charge cannot be perfectly sustained across time. It decays according to the relation:

E(dt) = E0 * e^(-lambda * dt)

Where:

E0 = the initial absorbed energy of the perceptual event

dt = the delay between perception and inscription

lambda = the rate of dissipation within the organism

To extend delay is to risk attenuation. Once the scintillation peak has passed, further technical refinement does not increase meaning — it reduces it. This is the persistent error of equating labor with intensity.

The studio is therefore not primarily a site of representation, nor a reenactment of historical style. It is a field of energetic timing. The painter does not copy the world; he intercepts light and negotiates its decay through delay.

THE DAVIDSON HYPOTHESIS The Physics of the Scintillating Mark I

Peter Davidson - Decaying studio apple 2026

 Pencil, felt tip pen, white out pastel coloured pencil on paper

16 cm  x 8 cm

The Physics of the Scintillating Mark I

“I am not describing a theory from the outside; I am constructing a system through the praxis of painting and drawing, building it from within the act itself.”

We do not inhabit the world in real-time. There is always a gap, Δs, between photon striking the eye and hand touching the surface—we are here and we are not here. We are never fully present. This interval may not be a flaw but a condition: a Sovereign Zone in which aliveness is assembled and rendered.

Within this delay lies an interior expanse, a viscous, reactive medium I call Optical Jelly. Sensation bends it, memory thickens it, tradition exerts inertia. As long as life persists, the Jelly remains pressurized, converting difficulty into potential.

Δs does not simply interrupt perception; it appears to construct it. What feels immediate is stabilized within the delay. Optic input thickens with memory and expectation, accumulating as non-linear pressure. The organism cannot sustain indeterminacy indefinitely, so discontinuous signals are stitched into apparent continuity. This is the necessary fraud—not deception, but fabrication. Immediacy is produced. Drawing reopens that stabilization. By lingering within Δs, the artist resists premature closure and exposes the act of construction itself.

Hesitation, erasure, prolonged looking—these function as charging operations. The greater the tolerated difference between perception and resolution, the greater the eventual force of release. When potential saturates, a threshold is crossed. A vertical leap across Δs: the Sprite. The mark is its fossil. Scintillation—the vibration of the line—records resistance overcome at the moment of conversion. The mark does not depict the object so much as register the crossing.

This can be observed in the yard at 2Dogs Art Space. Light, scent, sound, temperature—the external field remains constant. Yet the dogs diverge. One halts, suspended in saturation. Another moves fluidly, converting uncertainty into direction. A third commits too quickly and misaligns. Memory reshapes their interiors. The yard stays fixed; the organisms shift.

Perception is less reception than navigation. Identical inputs, divergent crossings. The artist differs only in remaining conscious within Δs. Drawing records not the yard, but the traversal.

Δs endures across tools, media, and eras. A drawing’s value may lie in its fidelity to the charge preceding discharge. When the organism dies, its interior field collapses. Potential dissipates. The mark remains—a residue of delay made visible.

Jelly → Δs → Sprite: a working model of conversion, tested in the act and preserved in the line.

The Sovereign Zone: A Defense of Artistic Praxis and the Delay

 

Peter Davidson - pomegranate delay and scintillation on rock hook

Perspex drypoint etching on paper

8 cm on 10 cm 

The Sovereign Zone: Art Finished Through Delay and Scintillation

I’m building a language for artists — not for art historians, critics, academics, or bureaucrats. They’ve made their own languages, but those dialects fail to capture the actual delay between the optical and the spatial.

That delay manifests as a scintillation of influence — a vibration that only stops when the artist decides the work has reached its apogee. This is why an artist refuses to paint or draw all the way to the edges. To do so would be to finish a "graveyard image," dead and static.

The nature of that delay is where true influence happens. It’s the gap where every viewer sees the work differently. That isn’t a mistake; it is the fundamental nature of how we perceive space, light, and material.

The Sovereign Zone: A Defense of Artistic Praxis and the Delay

The Architecture of Restriction

In the traditional studio, rules function as a form of architectural order. They regulate the margin, the edition, the depth of line, and the cleanliness of the surface. Often, these standards restrict the artist before they even begin, crushing the scintillation of the original idea at the edges of the plate in a rush to produce a "finished picture". These standards claim to be neutral, but they rest on a shaky assumption: that the artist, the institution, and the world occupy the same synchronized present. They do not.

The Language of the Apogee

In my own studio, I work with salvaged Perspex, exploring the interaction between perception, action, and material. Printing free from historical rules—ignoring whether a plate is perfectly straight or beveled—forces me to see the work differently every time. I have stopped chasing the “perfect edition,” which is often just a static, dead image. Instead, my focus has shifted to the sovereign space of the print itself—the territory where experimentation, friction, and discovery happen.

Through this practice, I have observed a perceptual interval:

t_0 + D

(The Sovereign Delay: the interval between perception and action).

By the time perception becomes action, the moment has already shifted. The artist does not inhabit institutional time; they inhabit this interval. While galleries, museums, and schools operate on coordinated schedules, the studio—both historically and today—is a temporal outlier. This delay is where true influence occurs.

The Studio as Sovereign Jurisdiction

At Two Dogs Art Space, I treat the studio as a laboratory for independence. I do not work according to rules imposed from outside. I negotiate with materials, perception, resistance, and time, tracing the friction that makes the work my own. Praxis is not compliance; it is negotiation. To impose institutional criteria too early collapses the delay and stifles discovery. Without delay, there is no risk; without risk, there is no innovation.

Material as Data: Witnessing Delay

Across printmaking, painting, drawing, or performance, the medium records the delay. The tool acts as a seismograph, capturing friction and resistance:

• Printmaking: Using salvaged Perspex introduces a field of prior events—scratches, marks, and resistance. The burr is the crystallization of delay; plate tone is atmospheric evidence. Cleaning the plate into uniform compliance erases the trace of negotiation that gives the work its origin.

• Painting & Drawing: Each stroke records a staggered response. To paint or draw all the way to the edges just to complete a “picture” often suffocates the scintillation. In drawing the landscape, I map the friction of my own nervous system, not the yard.

Innovation and the Right to Opacity

Innovation cannot occur where outcomes must be legible in advance. It requires opacity—a protected interval where the work is not yet synchronized with institutional time. I defend that interval. Engagement with the institution may follow, but it must follow sovereignty, not precede it.

Art does not emerge from the clock. It emerges from the perceptual structure between eye and hand. When the needle enters the Perspex, I am not following a manual—I am tracing delay and asserting jurisdiction over time itself. In that interval—between perception and action—the artist must remain free.

Peter Davidson - Study of delay, eyetracking and aging

pencil coloured pencil felt tip pen and pastel on paper

20 cm x 12 cm

Why Nothing Reacts Instantly

        A (age)

          ↓

t0 → [D] → [δ] → Reaction

      ↑      ↑

     α       F

 (attention) (fatigue)

          ↓

          T

 (training ↓ δ)

No system reacts instantly.

Not a person.
Not a robot.
Not a computer.
Not an AI.

Whenever something responds to something else, time has passed. That delay isn’t random. It follows a simple structure.

You can write it like this:

t_reaction = t0 + D + δ

That looks technical, but it isn’t complicated.

It just means:

The time something reacts
equals
the time the input happened
plus the time spent waiting
plus the time spent thinking.

That’s it.

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Step 1: Something Happens (t0)

This is the starting point.

A light turns on.
A sound is heard.
A message arrives.
A ball is thrown toward you.

That moment is t0 — the beginning.

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Step 2: The System Waits (D)

Before reacting, the system has to gather the information properly.

Your eyes need a fraction of a second to register light.
A microphone collects sound in tiny chunks.
A network collects packets before passing them along.

This waiting or collecting time is D.

It’s not “thinking” yet.
It’s stabilizing the input.

If you try to react before this stage finishes, you’re reacting to incomplete information.

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Step 3: The System Thinks (δ)

After the input is gathered, the system has to decide what to do.

Your brain chooses whether to move.
A robot calculates motor output.
A program runs an algorithm.
An AI runs its model.

That thinking time is δ.

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Step 4: The Reaction

Only after both steps happen do you get the response.

So the full story becomes:

t_reaction = t0 + D + δ

No reaction can happen before the waiting is done.
No reaction can happen before the thinking is done.

Every response is built from those two pieces of delay.

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Why This Matters

When something feels slow, people usually say, “The system is slow.”

But this model lets you ask a better question:

Is it waiting too long?
Or is it thinking too long?

If the waiting time (D) is large, maybe the buffer is too big.
If the thinking time (δ) is large, maybe the processing is inefficient.

Instead of blaming “slowness,” you can locate the cause.