


monochrome, greyscale, traditional media, graphite (medium), rough sketch, lineart, minimalism, white background, simple background. The whole picture is one large sheet of drawing paper with visible tooth and grain, almost entirely bare and white. A quick life drawing made in about ten minutes. Exactly one person, a naked woman, braced against something heavy that is pushing back at her from the other side. One long straight ruled line runs down the sheet: the edge of a slab, and that is the only straight line in the picture. Both her palms are flat on that slab at the height of her chest, her elbows locked straight, her shoulders driven up around her ears by the load. Her spine is one straight diagonal from her wrists down to her back foot. The front knee is bent square and that heel is off the ground; the back leg is locked straight and that foot is planted flat, the toes spread, and it is the only thing carrying her. Her head is turned down and away between her arms. Her whole body is one long line under load, and every joint is at the end of its travel. Nothing is drawn on the other side of the slab and nothing is drawn under her feet: there is nothing on the paper there. She is thirty-two, tall and narrow, a long neck, wide flat shoulders, small breasts, narrow hips, big hands, dark hair pulled back tight. Her body is described with very few long confident lines: thick and dark on the shadow side and underneath the forms, thinning away and breaking where the form turns into the light, and the inside of her left as bare paper. Three tones only: bare white paper, one light grey of open parallel strokes along her braced back, and four or five short solid black accents at her planted foot and her flat hands. Construction lines, faint erased ghosts and finger smudges here and there. In the lower right corner, a pencil signature: Ziggy.