Altered States — JM+PIPER

**Altered States**

**An experiment in drawing during states of exhaustion**

The flight from JFK to Sydney is about as far as you can travel, and the jet lag and time warp created by this kind of distance puts you in an altered state that is difficult to achieve any other way. After 2 days of travelling, it was 3 am when I finally had a hot shower, crawled into my bed, and thought to myself, “just do a quick drawing before you go to sleep.” I have no idea why I thought this in such a state of exhaustion, and I definitely didn’t have any expectations of what I would draw or any grandiose idea of reimagining my drawing.

Faced with a blank page, a surreal sense of reality and the ecstasy of finally being in my own bed, I drew the following scribble:

At the time I thought, “That looks (S%#@) terrible,” but oh well, time to sleep.

However, when I woke up with fresh eyes, I decided that there was something in this (I’m not exactly sure what “it” is, but something). So I decided to do a few more quick scribbles and that was when this scribble arrived:

This drawing was made with white acrylic ink on black paper. It consists of thousands of concentric circles layered to create various shades of light. I intended to make the shadows purely from the black paper. However, I was a little overzealous with my circles, and once the shadow is gone, you can’t get it back, so I had to use some black ink.

While on the plane from JFK, I read a book about light and perception. It described how light is simultaneously a wavelength and a particle, yet we perceive it as concentric circles. I think this is where the idea came from. I also watched a brilliant documentary called “The Colour of Ink” (both on the way over and on the way back).

I decided to repeat this drawing at a larger scale and to be strict with using purely white ink over the black background. This is the opposite of traditional charcoal drawings, where you draw the shadows and leave the paper as light. Here you are drawing the light and leaving the black paper as the shadow. Additionally, you can erase charcoal, whereas these ink drawings must be completed in one go.

(Detail)