Nicole De Brabandere

In what's known as the weighted line in drawing technique,  the rendering line thickens and thins relative to the pressure with which it meets the surface. When the contour goes from aligning with outline to spreading over the surface, it generates an intense, transversal indeterminacy between form, surface and movement. In becoming weighted, the contour stretches to absorb new dimensions, directions, volumes and consistencies that exceed image space. At the same time, the felt thought of weightedness only emerges in the conditions of its own emergence, a process that absorbs the specific qualities of materials, surfaces, gestures and rendering tools. This specificity troubles the abstract form of the rendering line and its empirical dimensions, emphasizing its co-compositional irreducibility. In the process, the weighted line incites movements of thought between surface, line, materiality, movement and form, between skin, pressure, volume and plasticity. The felt movement of the weighted line is as much inhabited as it is situated.

I develop the concept of the weighted line in relation with the vitality affects of the rendering contour in the paper 'Experimenting with Affect across Drawing and Choreography', available here:

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1357034X16640325

Below I adapt the weighted line to a rendering ecology involving a number of different surfaces, utensils and materials. I activate the weighted line by improvising with how the weight of the contour corresponds with movements, durations and affects beyond the form of the line and the flat surface of the page.

1. Spray paint blurs and sharpens a linear contour as it hovers a rendering movement of varying distance over a stencil slit opening. In pulling the stencil upwards, hard edges give way to a volume of diffuse coverage that disperses the contour into a felt density of air born particles.

2. Ink-drenched brush bristles glide over and then press deeply onto a porous paper surface, spreading parched skid marks. The irregular texture reroutes the smooth, linear flow of ink into absorbent textures that leave a distinctly dry taste in the mouth.

3. Drops of ink release from the tip of a brush. Each consecutive drop releases at a greater distance from the page while staggering forward along a linear path. The higher the distance of release, the greater the splat diameter and graphic dynamism rendered on the page surface. But as the rendering gesture swells drops at the stretching, upward tip of the brush, tension lifts off the page and begins to accumulate on the swelling surface of the drop before release. Just as intensity swells off the page the drying puddles suck the surface of the page into a tight pucker.

4. A brittle charcoal stick presses hard over a surface, where a staccato of impact with the surface explodes, fracturing and dispersing chunks of charcoal. The cracking movement charges the rendering with the anticipation of listening for the sound of a lit fuse as it runs out of ear shot before an explosion.  

5. The hard tip of a pencil presses into the soft surface of a pad of newsprint paper, leaving a path of broken fibres. The pressing movement forward bends and flexes the fibres outwards and upwards, raising an angular topography of variable tone and relief. The raised path affectively tenses the trajectory between slow, rigid, planar and angular, multiplying the directional liftings and landings of the rendering contour and drying up the smooth easy flows of practiced gesture.

6. A piece of paper is folded, leaving a gap in the crease where the surface weighs into the contour. The surfaces presses into and against the linear force of form, and against the force of pressing, folding fingers.

7. The fibres that compose an elastic cord are woven tightly then fray into a thickening contour. The fraying threads generate a volume of entangled curls and kinks, unwinding the clear linear form of the cord in multiple directions. As the cord frays with ever-greater density and intensity, it threatens to dampen the elastic tension by inversing the elastic time of held suspension, resonating a gaining volume of static noise. 

8. Ink variably bleeds from the trace relative to the speed with which the line is rendered. In fast movement the line holds tight continuity, in slow movement the ink absorbs through the discontinuous fractured pores of the paper surface, slowing the forward force of the line into the pace of paper porosity. At the fringes of the trajectory, long fibres draw the ink quickly and evenly along their length, while short fibres collide the ink bluntly against impermeable cross-fibres into full stops. The variable degree of passage allowed by the paper texture usurps the intense directionality of the rendering gesture.

9. A single horizontal crease articulates a contour that is pinched halfway down a piece of paper. As a paint can evenly hovers and sprays over the fold, the contour sharpens into a fine line over the folded peak and broadens where the fold relaxes. At the site where the crease ceases, the paper draws the contour over the surface, making it appear heavy with the voluminous spread of paint. The apparent weightedness of the contour has an inverse intensity relative to the distribution of topographic form of the folded paper, conflating the two.

10. The contour returns, this time as the surfaces separating layers of stacked paper. This cross-sectional contour amplifies as separations between pages are widened by wooden wedges that are inserted into the stack of paper, and dampens as the contour recedes away from the wedges in a narrowing taper. The space of separation is not empty but coincides with the shadowed heaviness of deep relief that seems to solidify. In contrast, the precariously layered bulk of stacked paper that contour the volumes affectively fuse into impenetrable blocks. 

11. Charcoal again becomes heavy as it is sandwiched and crushed between surfaces of paper with a rolling pin so that the contours of its fractures articulate the explosive weight of the cylinder surface as it disperses multi-directionally. This is a residue of the form of the charcoal cylinder gradually becoming flush with the paper surface while also becoming particulate. The residue left on the page in this intense dispersion dampens the directional intensity of the rolling weight by sharply articulating the graphic geometry of each fracture as it impacts and forcibly presses short movements over the paper surface.  

12. The paper surface holds evenly spaced ink traces and then scrunches into an angular topography under the pressure of closing fists. In the scrunching, the paper becomes a volume of irregular undercuts that break up the contours into jagged fragments that align new contours from across discontinuous planes. The paper aligns new contours modulating their weight between line and plane in a patchwork of thinning highlights and saturating shadows.