The power of a line, finding comfort in challenge

I find comfort in restraints; maybe it feels better when it’s difficult. I don’t use brushes when I paint, I use knives. Always. I draw only in pen, restricting myself to five, maybe six lines. The fewer the better, and ideally perched on Cornish cliff with a sheer drop beneath my feet.

One line drawing of The Rumps, North Cornwall. Drawn en plein air

My process starts here, watching the land and sea and trying to reduce them, contain them, to as few marks as I can. In this way I get to know the form strangely intimately, with everything stripped apart from the honest depiction of what makes really it recognisable; how the land tumbles to meet the water, how trees gather and precede proud mountains.

Four line drawings at Lake Tahoe, drawn en plein air

When I first moved to London I took a life drawing class, still the only one I’ve ever done. Funny how pivotal moments often look the same as all the rest. One of the prompts was to watch the model and let your hand move without glancing at the paper. Another was to never lift the pencil. Once I discovered this I never shaded a drawing again. In the long 20 minute segment at the end of the class, meant for a detailed drawing, I drew one line versions of the women elongated on the floor in front of me, again and again, trying to capture her as she was in one movement, without watching my hand. I have my favourite of them framed in my flat, four years on.

Woman lying on her front, one line, Georgia Hart 2022

This is the beginning of a process that informs the paintings I go on to make. When I visit a new place I want to paint, I will sit with the landscape and try to encompass it in its simplest form. I must watch what’s in front of me for far longer than I draw. It creates a relationship. I listen to the noises, follow the lines of the land, and then I have to figure out not only what lines are required, but where to start and when to end. So much time and thought, and so many attempts, produce something so incredibly simple. Something that looks, possibly, easy. But simple and easy often reside far away from each other.

It has taken two years and hours and hours of flow state to refine the drawings in my beaten up sketchbook, and elevate them to something where they are ready to exist in the world. I trialled pens, paper textures, sizes. I settled on a textured canvas paper to speak to the paintings I create, which started on paper; when I had no studio and nowhere to store canvases.

So they are the beginning and they speak to the end. Each one is a little piece of a place, and the first experience I had of it. The initial foray in trying to capture it, wrangle it, and actualise how I saw it.