Silhouettes

Line is the oldest thing the hand can do: before colour, before volume. Sanguine — the red chalk Leonardo and Watteau drew with — gives a warm, living line; ink gives a final one that cannot be erased. The culture of line is the ability to say a body in one movement: where the tension is, where the weight, where the turn. The female figure is the hardest examination in that skill.

The series passes it without a face and without detail. The body is reduced to a silhouette: posture, tone and one colour — sanguine, ink or a blue stroke. The line runs from shoulder to hip and does not stop to explain anything. It is graphics in its pure state carried onto the wall: what usually lives in an artist's folder here has been given size and matter.

Thin relief on artboard along the line, sanguine and ink on a light ground, here and there blue pigment in a single stroke; epoxy resin, which fixes the line like glass over a drawing. Gold leaf is hardly used — the series is about the line, not the gold. The edition is numbered.

A series for a bedroom, a bathroom, a boudoir, a dressing room — for private spaces where the quiet of the image matters. Silhouettes do not look at the viewer; they simply stand.