drawing within archive
essays on form, feels + fields

Eileen Cubbage Eileen Cubbage

Drawing What You Actually Feel

Your hand records what's happening in your body whether you intend it or not. Jaw tension changes pressure. Shallow breath shortens strokes. A tight gut makes certain gestures impossible. Drawing What You Actually Feel examines how marks function as records of physiological state—how your nervous system, breath, and muscular organization inscribe themselves directly into line, pressure, and rhythm.

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Eileen Cubbage Eileen Cubbage

Drawing as Inquiry

Drawing doesn't begin with conclusions. It begins with questions—gestures that test, probe, search. Drawing as Inquiry examines how authority emerges not from certainty, but from the rigor of sustained asking.

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Eileen Cubbage Eileen Cubbage

Making Marks That Endure

In a culture that prizes correction and refinement, drawing offers a counterpoint: authority built from what remains. Marks That Endure examines how presence persists not through polish, but through commitment to the uncorrected trace.

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Eileen Cubbage Eileen Cubbage

Showing Up in the Work

Think of the drawings you return to. The ones that hold your attention. Rarely are they perfect in finish. More often they carry edges. Interruptions. Exposed decisions. You see the false start left visible. The heavy stroke that risked overpowering the page. The tremor that split an arc. These don’t diminish authority. They establish it.

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Eileen Cubbage Eileen Cubbage

Knowledge Without Explanation

Some knowledge doesn't explain itself. It doesn't translate into words or convert into arguments. It arrives as form, as trace, as pressure. Knowledge Without Explanation explores how drawing carries meaning without articulation—how what's made visible isn't always what can be described.

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Eileen Cubbage Eileen Cubbage

drawing the quiet yes

The loudest marks aren't always the strongest. The Quiet Yes explores how barely visible gestures carry authority in drawing practice, how subtle shifts create structural transition, and how preservation of delicate marks becomes stance. Not weak whispers, but marks that trust their own sufficiency—that organize without overpowering, that structure without shouting.

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Eileen Cubbage Eileen Cubbage

the art of changing mid-line

Lines don't have to finish as they start. The Art of Changing Mid-Line explores how marks adapt while still in motion, how interruption becomes the next phase of the gesture, and how capacity to change mid-course creates resilience in drawing practice. Not correction after the fact, but adaptation inscribed directly into form as it emerges.

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Eileen Cubbage Eileen Cubbage

becoming through the page

The most honest drawings record transition—the in-between state when you're neither what you were nor what you'll be. This essay explores how marks document change in progress, how the body registers shifts before language names them, and how the page archives states too fluid to capture otherwise. Not error, but evidence of actual changing.

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Eileen Cubbage Eileen Cubbage

drawing without a map

Drawing plans end where friction begins. Drawing Without a Map explores how resistance in mark-making signals when to stop following your blueprint and start following material conditions, how lines navigate through contact rather than predetermined routes, and how drawing process discovers direction through making. Not random marks, but marks that orient through encounter—with surface, material, the body's actual capacity.

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