Nick Willing

And I think that's what she was doing.

She was taking photographs of something so that she could see what it looked like, you know, smaller.

I mean, for us, it's incredibly important because we see the evolution of a picture.

So we use that not only to establish provenance of a picture, but we also use it in case we need to do any restoration work, you know, so we can see how a picture evolved and what needs repairing and why.

That happens quite a lot nowadays with some of the earlier work from the 50s and 60s.

There are many ways to look at that.

The first way is that drawing for her was a physical process that involved the whole body.

It was a form of concentration.

When she drew, when she started drawing as a small child, she made this noise.

Like this as she was drawing.

And when her mother heard that coming from her room, she knew that she'd be fine for two or three hours.

So she was like, okay, she's drawing and she's in a trance.

I want to ask her, is it a trance that you're in?

And she says, no, darling, I'm just drawing.

But she did that throughout her life.

In fact, I came to the studio a few months before she died and she was drawing and she wasn't making that sound.

And I thought, oh shit.

She didn't know she was making it, but it was so loud and so much part of her.

We just associated that as being who she was.

And when she lost that, we thought she'd lost something.