Automatic Drawing

A small sheet covered in one racing, unbroken line, drawn fast with no subject decided in advance, out of which hands and birds and a fish keep half-surfacing and dissolving again, one of the first times the unconscious itself was let hold a drawing pen.

1. 1
   The one continuous line

   Everywhere; the ink can be followed almost anywhere on the sheet before it stops

   The drawing is built from a single nervous skein of line that loops back on itself, and most of the sheet can be travelled along it without the pen ever seeming to lift. That unbroken racing line is the physical trace of a hand that was not stopping to plan. It is the most important thing on the page, because it is the evidence that the mark came first and the image, if any, came after.
2. 2
   Hands surfacing out of the tangle

   In the denser knots of line, where fingers and a curved palm briefly resolve

   In places the line almost settles into a hand, fingers spreading, and then dissolves back into the web before it becomes a whole figure. Hands are one of the fragments Masson’s automatic line keeps half-forming. Nothing here is a drawn-then-filled hand; it is a hand the eye finds in marks that were not made to depict one.
3. 3
   Birds half-forming

   Toward the upper reaches of the web, where a wing or a beak-shape catches

   A wing-curve, the dart of a beak: birds are another of the recurring shapes that surface and sink in Masson’s automatic sheets. They are suggestions, not illustrations, the line tipping for a moment toward a recognizable creature and then racing on past it.
4. 4
   A breast and a fish in the line

   Among the half-figures across the field, where a soft curve and a tapering body read as a breast and a fish

   Among the fragments, a rounded breast-curve and the tapering body of a fish briefly read out of the tangle. These body-and-creature fragments (hands, birds, a breast, a fish) are the ones that recur across Masson’s automatic drawings: the line keeps almost condensing into a body or an animal and then letting it go.
5. 5
   No ground, no horizon

   The sheet as a whole; there is no floor line and no sky

   Nothing tells you which way is up or where a "floor" would be. The marks float in an unanchored, all-over field rather than sitting inside a described space. That refusal of a fixed ground is part of why the drawing reads as a record of an act rather than a view of a scene; there is no scene for it to be a view of.
6. 6
   The speed in the mark

   At the turns, where the line whips and overshoots

   At the turns the line races past and overshoots, and elsewhere it thickens into a worried knot before shooting across an open patch. That whip and that uneven rhythm are the pace of the drawing made visible: this is a fast mark, and the velocity is part of what you are looking at, not a flaw in it.