This self-portrait study—pencil, felt-tip pen, coloured pencil, watercolour, and correction fluid on acid-free F2 paper—emerged today from a sense of failure elsewhere in my practice. Printmaking had collapsed, painting resisted me, and drawing became the place to which I returned. I did not return to drawing in order to recover likeness, nor to stabilise a familiar motif. I returned because drawing permits me to enter Apeiron through perception rather than representation.
Here, I understand Apeiron as a condition of the unformed: a field in which perception remains open, unstable, and unfinished. It is not something I attempt to illustrate. Rather, it is encountered through the delay between looking and making. I do not treat this delay as temporal duration. In my practice, time behaves as space: a field in which residues, possibilities, and limits coexist.
In my experience, the visual system does not present the motif as a continuous and perfectly resolved image. What arrives in consciousness seems already interrupted—registered through movements of the eyes, attention, memory, and bodily sensation. Looking therefore leaves residues. Each new observation enters a field already populated by traces of previous observations. In drawing, these residues become visible. What I thought I was seeing as a face becomes a succession of fragments: edges, tonal shifts, textures, interruptions, remembered contours, and small moments of attention.
The digital image of my own face intensifies this instability. I am not simply looking at myself; I am looking at an image that has already passed through another technological structure of representation. The face exists simultaneously as physical presence, digital image, memory, and drawing. Each layer alters the next. Drawing makes this instability difficult to ignore.
The materials become agents within this delay. Pencil records hesitation and the gradual formation of a contour. Felt-tip introduces a more immediate and sometimes disruptive chromatic presence. Coloured pencil allows attention to accumulate in smaller, more granular traces. Watercolour opens the surface into areas of diffusion and intensity. Correction fluid interrupts the accumulating structure, creating moments of absence within what has already been drawn.
Correction fluid is particularly important to this praxis. It does not function simply as a means of correcting an error. Its role is closer to interruption. Traditional illustration carries with it an inherited expectation that mistakes should be identified, corrected, concealed, and ultimately brought into conformity with an established image. Correction fluid allows me to refuse that obligation. It does not necessarily return the drawing to a previous state. Instead, it introduces another event. The white mark becomes part of the drawing. In this sense, correction is no longer correction; it becomes a means of reopening the field.
This is important because illustration has a gravitational pull. Once a recognisable face begins to emerge, there is a temptation to complete it—to resolve the eyes, clarify the nose, correct the proportions, establish the mouth, and make the image increasingly convincing as an image of its subject. But that movement toward resolution can also terminate the perceptual event. The drawing begins to obey the memory of what a face is supposed to look like rather than remaining responsive to what is actually occurring through looking. I am interested in resisting that closure.
The drawing therefore moves between construction and interruption. A line establishes something; another line questions it. Colour asserts itself; correction fluid removes part of the assertion. A contour appears convincing, only to become unstable when another observation enters the field. The face remains recognisable, but recognition is never allowed to become the final authority.
The most important moment, however, is not the beginning of the drawing but the moment at which I stop. Stopping is not quite a decision. It is experienced first as a sensation. There comes a point at which another mark no longer seems capable of intensifying the perceptual field. The drawing has accumulated enough competing traces that a further intervention risks becoming merely additive. The next line would not open another possibility; it would simply enter the existing density.
At that point, the drawing is not necessarily finished. It is saturated.
Saturation is different from completion. Completion belongs to the logic of the finished object: the image has achieved its intended form and can therefore be declared complete. Saturation belongs to the behaviour of the field itself. It describes a threshold at which further action ceases to produce meaningful reconfiguration. This is where cessation becomes part of the praxis.
The sensation of stopping arrives before conscious explanation. It feels pre-reflective: not a judgement of beauty, composition, or likeness, but a recognition that the next mark would alter the field without necessarily deepening it. The drawing has reached a temporary equilibrium between what has been perceived, what has been remembered, what has been erased, and what remains unresolved.
That equilibrium is not symmetry. It is not harmony. It is not aesthetic perfection. It is a dynamic balance within delay.
Every mark enters a surface already carrying the residue of previous marks and previous acts of looking. As the drawing develops, the density of that residue increases. Hue, line, texture, erasure, water, and correction fluid accumulate into a complex perceptual field. At a certain threshold, the distinction between addition and interference becomes unstable. The mark that might once have produced a new sensation begins instead to collapse into what is already there.
That collapse is the signal to stop.
I do not understand this signal as mystical, nor do I regard it simply as conscious aesthetic judgement. It is a threshold experienced through the body before it is articulated by thought. Apeiron, in this sense, is not an infinite production of marks. It is the condition that allows the work to remain open long enough for such a threshold to become perceptible.
The paradox is that openness eventually produces cessation. The drawing must stop in order for its instability to remain visible.
If I continued indefinitely, the accumulation of marks would eventually suppress the very uncertainty I am trying to register. Too much information can become another form of closure. Saturation therefore establishes a limit—not a limit imposed from outside by convention, but one emerging from the internal behaviour of the work.
This self-portrait exists at that limit. It does not attempt to provide a definitive image of myself. Instead, it records a particular encounter between looking and making: a sequence of perceptual fragments translated into line, colour, wash, erasure, and residue. The face is present, but only provisionally. It is continually being constructed and dismantled.
What remains is not likeness alone, but the evidence of looking. The drawing becomes a site where perception, memory, material, and delay converge. Pencil hesitates. Colour interrupts. Water disperses. Correction fluid removes and simultaneously creates. Lines accumulate until they begin to interfere with one another. Recognition appears and then becomes unstable again.
Eventually, the field reaches saturation.
I stop.
Not because the image has become complete, but because the next mark would no longer belong to the same perceptual event. The cessation is therefore part of the drawing. The absence of the next mark is also a mark.
And in that moment, Apeiron is not represented. It is encountered as the interval between one possible continuation and the decision—or perhaps the sensation—not to make it. Cessation is not a moment in time but a position within the perceptual field: the region where further marks cease to reconfigure the work.
