YUKIFU / DRAWING ARCHIVE / 18 STUDIES
Before
the form.
A line before its name.
A sensation before its shape.
Studies in charcoal, scribbles and erased traces.
Digital concepts; material proposals describe intended work, not completed physical pieces.
18 studies / Select an image to enlarge.
Murrays Bay, 2008
Material proposal: Graphite, wax crayon, acrylic and gesso on linen
A place can remain long after its outline has become uncertain. In this abstract interpretation of Murrays Bay on New Zealand's North Shore, pale horizontal passages suggest the distance of water, while a wavering edge and scattered marks keep the land from settling into a recognisable view. The coastline is approached as a relationship between intervals, pressures and pauses rather than a scene to reconstruct.
The year 2008 acts as a point of return, not a claim that the image was made then. Broken continuities and partly covered gestures evoke the way a remembered or imagined place can hold different times at once. A concentrated dark passage interrupts the openness without explaining what occurred there. The work leaves room for the viewer's own associations rather than assigning an event to the location.
Read the full work ↗Unequal Tempo
Material proposal: Charcoal, graphite and wax crayon on pale linen
Different rhythms occupy the same field without dividing it into opposite halves. A stuttering accumulation, a slow rubbed mass and a fragile contour keep interrupting one another. Some marks remain continuous across these changes: the presence within the image is not replaced each time its rhythm shifts.
The surrounding strokes press inward, suggesting that an internal rhythm is never entirely separate from the conditions around it. The work asks how a body can retain its own pace within environments organised around consistency, productivity and easy measurement. It offers neither a diagnosis nor a simple passage from darkness into light.
Read the full series ↗What the Machine Sees
Material proposal: Charcoal, graphite points and wax crayon on cotton paper
An uncertain figure meets its own approximate description. Across the field, continuous gestures become points and disconnected contours. Some ambiguity disappears; other passages acquire a certainty the first figure never possessed. The image imagines machine vision as a translation rather than a neutral mirror.
A scan may describe a surface while leaving the circumstances of that surface unavailable. Inference can close a gap without recovering what once occupied it. The work asks what becomes visible when a body is made readable, and what is lost when a description is mistaken for the whole. The point field is a visual metaphor, not a record of an actual scan.
Read the full series ↗Evolved, Yet Confined
Material proposal: Charcoal, graphite, wax crayon and gesso on linen canvas
A dinosaur and a future human enter the same field with bodies from different eras. Dorsal points on one side echo the inflated compartments of the other. Their contrast soon exceeds a simple distinction between past and future. Constraints that cannot be solved by increasing size or adding functions hold both beings inside the same imagined game.
Broken routes and compressed spaces suggest competition without explaining what it means to win. Accumulation makes the body cumbersome while leaving less room to move. The critique of growth and efficiency arises from this awkward coexistence rather than a slogan. What begins with the freedom of a child's game asks whether a larger body and a better life can really be understood as the same thing.
Movement Before a Name
Material proposal: Compressed charcoal, graphite and wax crayon on cotton paper
The line does not describe an object here. It tests a direction that has not yet been decided. Compressed black masses and fine marks escaping their edges move at different speeds. The image appears to gather around a centre, yet small departures and interruptions prevent it from settling into a closed form. This incompleteness holds the eye.
Faint erasures and brief touches of colour reveal choices rather than a finished image. Before asking what is depicted, we begin to notice where pressure gathers and where it releases. The open ground is more than a background: it preserves the possibility of another movement. The work suspends our habit of understanding through names and invites sensation to arrive before recognition.
Soft Resistance
Material proposal: Charcoal, white chalk and wax crayon on linen canvas
A narrow concentration of marks suggests an upward force, while loose lines and pale interruptions repeatedly divert it. The difference between dense passages and barely touched ground reveals several pressures within a single gesture. Rather than presenting balance as an achievement, the work places the awkward search for balance at its centre.
The proposed linen surface gives this tension a tactile dimension. A line seems to catch, break and resume rather than travel without resistance. Resistance becomes a partner that changes the gesture, not simply an obstacle to overcome. Uncorrected movements and generous empty areas allow awkwardness to become the beginning of a different rhythm rather than evidence of failure.
Against the Grain
Material proposal: Graphite and wax crayon on birch plywood
Low wandering lines and uneven accumulations suggest a path while refusing a steady progression. In this study for a birch plywood surface, the grain becomes an active participant in movement rather than a passive support. Small red marks do not direct the eye with certainty; they remain closer to moments of hesitation.
Retracing the same area is hardly an efficient way to travel. Yet repetition produces intervals and densities that were absent at the beginning. The work attends less to arrival than to the encounter between a gesture and a surface. Following the grain and resisting it need not be separate decisions: they may alternate within one small, ongoing negotiation.
Ground Memory
Material proposal: Charcoal, white chalk and ochre pigment on a concrete panel
The ground is imagined as a place that receives and retains everyday movement. Faded curves, dark patches and brief traces of colour do not reconstruct a particular event. They suggest instead a game that has ended without disappearing completely. Differences in the proposed concrete surface seem to give each mark its own duration.
We may try to identify whose movement remains or what was once drawn, but the image withholds a complete account. This unexplained space becomes part of the work. Memory is less an intact record than a process of arranging surviving fragments through the present gaze. An ordinary surface underfoot becomes a quiet repository for that incomplete attention.
Between Pauses
Material proposal: Graphite, compressed charcoal and rust-red crayon on cotton paper
Across this extended horizontal field, the distances between marks matter as much as the marks themselves. Unequal concentrations remain apart rather than forming a continuous narrative. The eye pauses at a dark passage, searches through a pale one and crosses an interval of almost untouched ground. Looking cannot proceed at a single speed.
These intervals can be read as silences between sounds or hesitations within a conversation. Empty ground is not a failure to provide content: it asks us to remember the previous gesture and anticipate the next. The work resists the assumption that richness requires accumulation. It considers the relationships that become possible when things remain separate yet share a common space.
Almost Unheard
Material proposal: White oil pastel, chalk and blue pigment on blackened wood
Bright lines against a dark ground offer a strong contrast without resolving into a stable figure. Some marks come forward decisively; others seem to sink back into the surface. The proposed combination of blackened wood and oil pastel makes this appearance and disappearance feel material, not merely optical. Hesitation and insistence occupy the same gesture.
Longer looking brings out faint scratches and small interventions of colour that initially pass unnoticed. The strongest mark is not the only one worth attending to. Rather than treating reduced visibility as failed expression, the work offers it as a different intensity, encountered only at closer range. Its quiet voice asks what we notice, and what our habits of attention leave behind.
Under the Surface
Material proposal: Charcoal, wax crayon, acrylic and gesso on canvas
The front and back of the image become difficult to distinguish among layered colour and redrawn lines. A trace thought to be covered appears through a pale passage, while a newer mark interrupts an earlier movement. What might initially look like one final decision emerges as the coexistence of many choices. The surface holds the time of revision.
Overwriting does not erase the past completely. A changed decision meets the resistance of earlier marks and helps shape the present image. The proposed combination of gesso, colour, charcoal and crayon supports these differences in time and touch. The work can be approached not as a resolved answer, but as an open surface on which abandoned choices continue to speak.
A Line Passing Through
Material proposal: Blue wax crayon, graphite and white chalk on a cement panel
A blue line seems to have a direction, then hesitates, bends and leaves the expected route. Scattered marks complicate the time of its passage. Without offering a clear departure or destination, the image retains the sensation of moving. What we follow is not useful information about a path but a changing rhythm of pressure and friction.
The floor-like material proposal connects movement to the everyday body. Travel always encounters the resistance of surfaces and the burden of distance; an open space is not necessarily available to everyone in the same way. Stops and returns make those conditions felt. Within the lightness of a free scribble, the work holds both the demand to keep moving and the possibility of remaining still.
Held Together
Material proposal: Compressed charcoal, graphite, red crayon and white pigment on heavy cotton paper
The dark centre appears solid at first, yet closer attention reveals an unstable gathering of lines moving in different directions. Heavy pressure, fine scratches and abrupt colour compete for the same place. This density feels less like a harmonious agreement than a collision that has not yet ended.
Escaping lines and traces of correction prevent the centre from closing completely. Being together need not mean moving in one direction or eliminating difference. The work therefore refuses to make cohesion a simple sign of stability. It considers a relationship in which elements hold one another while struggling to preserve their own movement, and the tension required to sustain it.
An Uncertain Creature
Material proposal: Charcoal, graphite and blue crayon on cotton paper
A few dorsal points, a low body and a long tail-like trace briefly give a dinosaur its appearance. The outline never closes completely, and parts of the body dissolve into the restless movement of drawing. This creature is less an anatomical reconstruction than a possibility made jointly by childhood memory and the moving hand.
The work asks how little information is needed for recognition. Once we attach a familiar name, we supply the missing parts ourselves, only for the incomplete line to unsettle that confidence again. Remembered objects are not preserved whole. Forgotten passages, exaggerations and later sensations mingle to create a body that feels both intimate and unfamiliar.
Almost Two
Material proposal: Charcoal, red wax crayon and ochre pigment on linen canvas
A broad turning gesture and a pale trace behind it suggest two presences, but their boundaries remain uncertain. Where colour interrupts the centre, bodily outlines and paths of movement exchange roles. It is difficult to decide whether these creatures are colliding or playing. That uncertainty supplies the work with its tension.
Overlapping scribbles blur individual figures while making their relationship more visible. Instead of separating objects to identify them, we notice how an encounter changes their shapes. A relationship is not simply a line drawn between two completed beings. Here, bodies and boundaries seem to arise through meeting, touching and entering one another's space.
Only the Traces
Material proposal: White chalk, charcoal and blue crayon on a concrete panel
The dinosaur is imagined through the place it has passed rather than shown directly. Clusters that might be footprints or rubbed-out chalk, together with a long curving afterimage, summon a body without confirming it. The proposed ground does not preserve these traces as perfect evidence. It allows them to appear worn, scattered and uncertain.
Attempting to reconstruct the absent body, the viewer contributes remembered shapes and movements. Absence becomes an opening for imagination rather than a simple lack. The work reveals how observation and memory can be inseparable. Reading what remains is both a search for something that existed and an act of making a new form through the present gaze.
Before a Name
Material proposal: White oil pastel, graphite and rust pigment on blackened wood
A light line crossing a dark field suggests an extended living body. Passages that appear to be neck, torso and tail soon separate into independent bends and knots. The moment of recognising a dinosaur alternates with the moment when that name no longer seems sufficient. Darkness works less as scenery than as a condition that keeps the outline uncertain.
The incomplete figure is unfamiliar without being entirely threatening. Like a childhood scribble, it offers a form of closeness that does not depend on accurate explanation. The work lingers in the short interval between sensation and identification. Allowing a shape time to change, rather than immediately classifying it, can make even a familiar subject available to another kind of encounter.
Something Kept
Material proposal: Charcoal, graphite and ochre chalk on cotton paper
A slender stem and a small base occupy very little of the surrounding space. An incomplete enclosure recalls a device for preserving a specimen, without explaining exactly what needs to be protected. The eye moves between the small form and the empty field. The size of an object and the time we spend with it need not be proportional.
Preservation here can mean more than preventing an object from changing. The attention once given to it, and the willingness to look at something that may disappear, also become worth keeping. The contrast between a weighty base and a fragile stem makes this uneven care visible. Empty and occupied areas matter equally, and sustained looking becomes a relationship in itself.