This is a value study, which is to say it’s an array of light and dark from paper-white to graphite-black, with many shades of grey in between. I did it to warm up for an important drawing, of a friend of mine and the dog, now deceased, that she loved. I have made sketches of them prior to this value study, and found them lacking; so, to take some pressure off and get some momentum going, I carefully over the last few days built up this “stuffscape.”

The title, “stuffscape in F major,” has a musical reference because making an array of forms in a careful, rhythmic arrangement is similar to composing music. Some musical pieces are called “tone poems” for a similar reason: some music partakes of poetry.

There’s a pencil amongst the stuff. You don’t have to be a “Where’s Waldo?” whiz to find it. But to some it may sully the non-objective purity of the image. I say Rejoice, for this drawing is now Meta. There’s a lot of Meta going around these days. 🙂

I had a devil of a time, what with the soft graphite in the pencils I used, keeping the paper unsmudgedly clean. Old-school draughtmanship has its drawbacks.