


A photograph taken from above and from one side, at a steep angle, looking down at the floor of a real room, bright and empty: bare pale wooden floorboards, hard morning daylight coming in low and laying the long shadows of the window bars right across the floor. Lying flat on those boards is one large sheet of cream drawing paper, taped at two corners, the other two curling up. On the sheet is a charcoal drawing of two people lying together, both adults, in the middle of making love and both laughing: her head is thrown back with her eyes screwed shut into deep creases and her mouth wide open, her chin up and the cords showing in her neck; his forehead is dropped down onto her collarbone and his shoulders are shaking; one of her hands is still flat on his back. Their two heads are the only part carried all the way to a finish, worked in dense charcoal with the paper grain showing through. Their bodies are drawn with very few long confident lines, thick and dark where they press together and thinning away to nothing everywhere else, and below their knees there is nothing on the paper at all. Her thrown-back hand runs off the edge of the sheet and carries on in charcoal directly on the real floorboards beyond it. Nothing else is in the room. The shadows of the window bars fall across the sheet and across both drawn bodies. Hard daylight, high key, sharp focus, deep depth of field. In one corner of the sheet, a pencil signature: Ziggy.