The Oak Tree part #0,-1 - Pen-plotter drawing - edition 1 - 58 x 76 cm
This video documents the creation of a pen-plotted artwork that was marked by a surprising incident—one that would go on to have a lasting influence on my artistic practice.
This central panel of The Oak Tree is a particularly complex drawing, involving many successive stages, including a phase of hand-applied colour using a paintbrush.
After several weeks of work, I finally reached the last step: titling and signing the piece in pencil.
Bent over the paper, completely focused on this delicate and irreversible task, I suddenly watched in disbelief as two bright red drops fell onto the drawing.
I straightened up to discover that my nose was bleeding onto the wooden floor. At the time, I was sleeping very little and working far too much, and the physical exhaustion had led to an accident that seemed to ruin a drawing into which I had poured so much care and energy.
For a week, I could not bring myself to contact the collector who was expecting the piece. When I finally found the courage to explain what had happened, convinced that I would have to start the entire drawing again, his response completely surprised me. He wanted to keep it exactly as it was. To him, the “blood signature” transformed the work into something deeply personal, passionate and almost ritualistic.
Even so, I remained uncomfortable with the stained drawing. Eventually, I had the idea of plotting a tiny fragment of a garden between the two drops, using a dark red ink. Suddenly the composition felt coherent again, no longer accidental but intentional—almost like the seal affixed to an important document.
Those two drops, whose shape I had studied for so long with dismay, eventually became a recurring motif throughout my work. I later wrote an algorithm capable of generating similar stains digitally, allowing them to carry several layers of meaning: the vital fluid, the role of chance, pain, and the unexpected accidents that sometimes reshape both an artwork and an artist’s path.
- 0'00"Starting this plot on a sheet of Arches cold-pressed watercolour paper with four deckled edges. Probably the finest paper I have access to. This French paper, with its centuries-old history, has an outstanding texture, but also makes plotting considerably more challenging than a smooth paper such as Bristol.
- 0'10"Using a Rotring Isograph 0.3 mm. It’s quite a fine tip, but necessary to avoid moiré effects, as the tiny branches composing this drawing come extremely close to one another.
- 0'25"The ink is Rotring’s standard black ink, which offers excellent density and has proven to flow reliably through the tubular tip.
- 0'34"The video jumps to the end of the grassy section, where we are finishing the hatch patterns that create the illusion of different shades on each blade. The Rotring is now fitted with a 0.2 mm tip. Notice how the hatch patterns are optimized for plotting efficiency, encouraging long zig-zag paths that minimize pen lifts, one of the main bottlenecks in plotting time.
- 0'40"I like this part a lot—it’s pure ASMR. Long, closely spaced strokes drawn with a 0.2 mm pen follow the contour of the ground, creating a shadow that clearly separates what lies above the surface from what lies beneath it.
- 0'56"More ASMR. You can appreciate how far the Axidraw A1’s arm can extend, along with a glimpse of my studio at the time.
- 1'13"The part where the very long, dense underground textures are drawn is missing from this recording. Here we see the completed line art before the manual colouring stage. The hatch patterns on the oak leaves also create different shades by varying the density of the strokes.
- 1'17"Photograph of the blood incident.
- 1'21"Starting a tiny drawing in deep red ink, carefully positioned between the two dried blood stains, which happened to fall exactly where the Arches watermark is located.
- 1'36"Before attempting this delicate addition, I carried out several test runs on tracing paper to ensure nothing would go wrong.
- 1'40"The finished artwork.
