The Leaf and the Pencil

On the difficult difference between looking closely and being present.

Sometimes a leaf stops me, and for a little while I have no desire to do anything about it.

It is simply there. One edge has curled upwards and back upon itself, revealing a narrow strip of its paler underside. I look, and then find that I am still looking. The world has not grown quieter, but one small part of it has somehow become sufficient. There is nothing I wish to remember or understand. Something about the leaf has detained me, and I am content to be detained.

Then I remember that I can draw.

The impulse is not necessarily an intrusion. There is affection in it, perhaps even gratitude. I want to look more closely, to give the leaf the time and attention it seems to deserve. Drawing offers a way of remaining with something that might otherwise have held me for only a few moments.

But the instant I begin, something changes.

What seemed a single, effortless shape becomes a succession of difficulties. The lamina, the petiole, the midrib. The smaller veins finding their way towards the margins. The particular manner in which the blade narrows towards its apex. The leaf proves considerably less simple than my idea of a leaf.

Even the outline refuses to behave. It is easy enough to draw something recognisable as a leaf. It is much harder to draw this one.

I have made the midrib too straight. Looking again, I see a slight bend towards the tip, almost concealed by the shape of the blade. The curled margin is not simply an interruption of the outline; it changes the apparent width of the leaf. And there, close to the edge, I notice for the first time that a small piece is missing. The torn place catches the light.

I had overlooked it entirely. Now it seems essential to the drawing’s likeness.

The pencil exposes the laziness of recognition, that familiar habit by which we see just enough of something to know what it is, and then cease to look.

Surely I am paying closer attention now.

Yet before long I have other things to consider.

How shall I persuade a flat sheet of paper to accommodate the turning of a surface? Should the shadow be built through hatching or cross-hatching? Would a softer passage of graphite better describe the light? Have I made the outline too definite? Is the drawing becoming heavy where the leaf is delicate?

These are perfectly legitimate artistic questions. They are also rather demanding ones.

My attention turns to the pressure of the pencil, the direction of a stroke, the troublesome transition between one tone and another. A passage of shading almost works; I want to improve it. I become absorbed in a small difficulty of drawing that may have almost nothing to do with what first brought me to the leaf.

Am I seeing more, or experiencing less?

I am certainly noticing things I would otherwise have missed. But the original sense of wonder has not necessarily grown with that knowledge. Sometimes it seems to have withdrawn altogether, leaving me with the different satisfactions of making something well.

Then I look up from the shading I have been trying to improve. I have softened the curling margin into an agreeable curve, but the leaf turns more sharply. I can keep the line that works beautifully on paper, or follow the one before me.

The leaf corrects me.

There is a peculiar pleasure in this submission. The drawing becomes less an image I am imposing upon the world than a conversation in which the world is permitted to disagree.

For a moment, this seems to offer a way through the difficulty.

Perhaps the question is not how much I notice, or even how completely I am absorbed, but where the authority lies.

When I allow the leaf to correct my drawing, my attention remains answerable to what is before me. When I begin consulting the leaf merely to solve the drawing’s problems, something has shifted. The object of my attention has become material for an object of my making.

The distinction seems useful.

Until I try to apply it.

There are moments when the hand seems to know what it is doing, when seeing and drawing become almost indistinguishable. I am not consciously submitting to the leaf or imposing upon it. The movement passes between eye and hand without either appearing to take command.

And there are moments when the drawing itself reveals something. A line, placed almost without intention, makes a relationship visible that I had not recognised in the leaf. I look back, startled, and there it is.

Which holds authority then?

On paper, the fine veins near the curled margin threaten to swallow the narrow strip of its paler underside in a mesh of marks. I could leave some of them out, or deepen the shadow a little beyond what I actually see. Those changes might make the turn of the leaf more vivid, even as they make the drawing less exact. They might also be concessions to my desire for a beautiful page.

The leaf can correct a misplaced line. It cannot tell me which lines to leave out.

I cannot make the distinction as clean as I had hoped.

The same difficulty follows me into writing.

I want to describe the leaf. I begin with its colour, which ought to be simple enough.

Green.

But what green?

Lime, perhaps. Chartreuse. Emerald. Viridian. Sage, olive, fern, jade, celadon.

The names multiply with almost comic extravagance. There are enough greens in the language to furnish a forest, yet I may still be unable to find the one before me.

I conduct a little tribunal of colours, admitting one possibility, dismissing another, reconsidering a third. Viridian is too blue for the warmer green beside the midrib, though it comes closer to the shadow inside the curl. Sage approaches the paler underside but loses the brightness where the light catches the torn edge.

The search has made me notice that there is no single green to name.

But now the words have become interesting in themselves. I prefer one for its sound, another for the associations it carries. Celadon is a beautiful word. So is viridian. I could build a pleasing sentence around either.

The trouble is that a pleasing sentence may satisfy me before it has satisfied the truth of what I am trying to describe.

And there is no guarantee that the truth will make a pleasing sentence.

I want to write something of the encounter itself: why this ordinary thing held me, why I remained, what it felt like to give my attention to something that asked nothing of me.

So I arrange words.

A rhythm emerges. One sentence draws another after it. An image seems to carry something of the original feeling, and gradually the shape of a piece of writing appears.

Before long I am making decisions about cadence, balance, the placement of a phrase. I have ceased looking at the leaf and begun listening to the sentences.

But the writing has also changed what I remember.

The torn margin was not what stopped me, at least not so far as I knew. I did not notice it until I began drawing. Now it has become difficult to remember the leaf without it. The pencil made me see the missing piece; the writing has made me wonder why it matters.

How readily I could turn that little absence into a symbol of damage, or endurance, or impermanence. The language is waiting for me, full of possibilities.

But the leaf has not asked to become an illustration of my ideas. It was a leaf before I needed it to mean anything.

Still, I cannot deny that making things is one of the ways I have learned to love the world. Drawing is not always a desire to possess what I see. Writing is not necessarily an attempt to explain away what moves me. Sometimes the work is simply a means of remaining in the company of something that has touched me.

If I refuse the pencil for fear of losing the experience, I lose what the pencil might have revealed. If I refuse language, I surrender the possibility of discovering what I could not have known before trying to speak.

I am left with the strange possibility that attention may sometimes require a departure from its object.

But how far may I depart before I am no longer attending to it?

Even asking the question changes things.

I catch myself watching my own attention, wondering whether I am sufficiently present, whether my concentration has become too technical, whether the pleasure of making has displaced the pleasure of seeing.

Now I am attending not simply to the leaf, but to myself attending to the leaf.

And there is something faintly absurd about standing before a beautiful thing, so occupied with the quality of one’s own attention that one forgets to look.

Yet noticing this wandering may be what brings me back, though it guarantees nothing about the attention I bring.

No test seems to settle the matter. Not the amount of detail I perceive, nor the depth of my absorption, nor even my willingness to be corrected by what is before me. I could follow every contour faithfully and remain untouched by the thing itself. Another day, an unexpected line might bring back the wonder I felt before taking up the pencil.

And putting it down would not return me to where I began.

I would still see the bend in the midrib, the paler underside, the little missing piece I had overlooked. The work has altered my way of looking, whether or not it has brought me closer to the leaf.

And now, of course, I am doing with this essay what I have been wondering about all along.

I have taken an experience of looking at a leaf and made it into words. I have considered their proportions, altered their rhythm, removed what seemed excessive, searched for the right degree of lightness and weight.

The essay has acquired its own demands, just as the drawing did.

I can feel the temptation to make it resolve itself. To return to the beginning, put down the pencil, abandon the search for words, and find myself at last in undisturbed communion with the leaf.

It would be a beautiful arrangement.

And it would be another arrangement.

I look again at the curled margin, at the narrow strip of paler green beneath it. The small torn place catches a little light.

I could begin another drawing. I could search for another sentence.

Or I may simply remain where I am, looking.