The Pages

Ten pages, no words

Each page began as a plant I live beside. What remains is the space between its leaves, followed until it no longer had a name. Choose any page and print it at full size on plain, uncoated Letter paper, or print all ten. There is no order.

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All ten pages
Sprigs of cypress reach across a plain white plaster wall, one in focus at the bottom and one blurred at the top.
Two sprigs of cypress cross a plain white plaster wall. The lower one is sharp, every small scale-leaf distinct against the white; the upper one is a soft green blur. Most of the frame is wall, and the plant is drawn by the space it leaves.

Before you begin

Put a single page on the table and look at it before you pick anything up. The lines run thick in one corner and leave a clearing in another, and your eye will already have gone somewhere without asking you. Start there.

A pencil drawn along one line makes a small dry sound. Watercolour on ordinary paper follows the damp and stops at an edge you didn’t choose. For some minutes you are a person filling in a page. Then, on a good day, the table goes, and the question of whether you are doing it well goes with it, and there is only the line and the place it’s heading. You won’t notice this while it’s happening. You notice afterward.

It doesn’t always come. When it doesn’t, stop, and leave the rest of the page bare. The pages carry no fold lines or marks for what comes next, so that while you colour, colouring is all there is. When the page is dry, folding and sowing is the next step.

A person holds two large glossy leaves up against the side of their face, one eye showing at the edge of the frame.
A person raises one arm and holds two large, glossy leaves against the side of their head. Their forearm runs down the length of the frame, and only one eye shows at the edge, past the leaves. The wall behind is pale and plain.