Cowlick

Lumen & Logic

Ink lines on bare paper, and nothing else — no fill, no grey, no crossing anywhere on the sheet. Every line begins as one ray of a plain pencil leaving a single point, and is then handed to a reparametrisation of the circle that is the identity where it starts and a fixed comb by the time it reaches the rim, so each line bends through one annulus and runs straight again on both sides of it, at a new angle. That comb is a product of Poisson kernels — one per seam, each with its own place and depth — normalised back to a single turn, which makes it strictly increasing and therefore makes crossing impossible rather than merely unlikely: two lines that started in order stay in order at every radius, however hard the comb squeezes. Because the map is closed form its derivative is the local line spacing, and that is what draws the picture. A fan is grown against one target spacing: wherever two neighbours have opened past it a new line is started between them on the spot, with a free tapered tip out in the open field, and wherever the coordinate crowds them below it the younger of the two retires — so the paper carries exactly as many lines as it has room for, evenly in the open fans, while nothing at all stops the lines from piling into near-solid black creases at the seams. Weight follows depth in that hierarchy, so the few lines that reach the centre are the heavy structure of the drawing and every hairline is infill. A slow waver sampled in the map’s own coordinates rather than per line makes neighbours bow together and stay parallel through the bow, the way a hand draws a bundle. The pencil itself is a knob — rays from one point, the arcs through two points, or plain parallels — which changes the whole subject of the picture without changing a single thing about the mark.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm