You see it in the air with the sun? This pencil has a very delicate curve. When it touches your paper it’s called drawing on the line so I draw it with a very very little curve, maybe one or two lines. But it’s very delicate. Then you take it out and you touch it with a pencil, like a paintbrush, and then you put it back on the paper. That’s like drawing and touching a paintbrush. It’s very delicate. It’s very hard to apply a thin line. It looks really cool.
Do you think drawing on the line or on a line with a line is more difficult?
I think it’s more difficult because you have to do so much at once, so you have to concentrate, and that’s the reason why I didn’t like drawing a single line. It’s a way to stop yourself in the middle of a drawing, but you’re also drawing on an invisible line. It’s like painting a single line, and then you put it in order, and you’re like painting a bunch of lines. You can’t stop yourself if you can’t see the invisible line, so you can never stop yourself, and you have to focus.
Does drawing on a solid line, like you do in your works, cause this trouble?
Actually, in one of my early notebooks I do a lot of shading, which makes it harder to put on the line. It would be easier to put on the line if you could just write what’s on the page, rather than draw it from behind. But it’s very hard, so maybe it’s not a very good idea [laughs], but when you draw on lines, you have to concentrate on putting the line on the page.
You do such a good job with lines in your drawings [laughs]. You get this line like a line between it and a line on the bottom, so it looks like nothing. I do this very deliberately, it makes me concentrate on the pencil and you don’t hear me. But it’s very difficult for me to draw the line smoothly.
You do, but maybe in a different way. It’s like my pencils are like a sponge. Like when I paint a sponge, I have to smooth down the sponge, if you don’t know how to paint a sponge, you don’t know. It’s difficult for me to try to use a perfect drawing technique. In drawing a line it’s very important not to make the line too straight