The most radical of all the large drawings that I have made has no material existence.

When David Rowan and Margaret Williams (Arbor Films) were directing a film about me in 1976 they wanted to include a passage in which a painting was to be shown in the making, from blank surface to finished work. In the end I went both one better and one worse than that.

Since I had no large painting planned at that time I decided to make a drawing (5' x 9' / 1.7 m x 2.8 m) occupying the most photographable wall of my studio. I started it in June and worked on it virtually every day for two or three hours, for over three months. My assistant at the time, David Lehrle, took photos regularly throughout, which meant going up and down stairs with a camera and tripod over five hundred times.

When in October I reached what I though was the conclusion of the drawing it occured to me that, since the work was all on film as a continuous process (of which this 'final result' was only a brief episode), it might be interesting to make it exist only as film. I could thus explore what lay beyond the 'finished work'. I therefore decided to rub out the drawing bit by bit, always keeping it a coherent overall composition. This return journey took about three weeks before I arrived at my starting point, the blank sheet of paper. I used up fifteen erasers including five typewriter-rubbers of the grittiest constitution I could find, but even these left ghostly traces of the marks I had made on the battle-scarred surface.

The photographs were processed into a five minute reel of film and the proper form of Drawing: A Film is the projection of this on to the original piece of paper which thus, acting as a screen, receives and relives its own history. It starts with nothing being projected on to virtually nothing and ends with that virtual nothing being projected onto itself as the last marks flicker out and disappear.

With the occasional wobbles and inconsistent exposure (plus the fact that the drawing was heavily lit from one side by the studio window) the film has the historic look of the home-made-under-adverse-conditions movie that gives it a special heroic flavour. I now know of course that all these imperfections and ineptitudes can be processed and edited out. A nice self-reflexive moment in the Arbor production shows me within their film projecting (at the Oriel Gallery in Cardiff) my film in its first full 'performance'.

As with most of the big drawings, I often turned the paper upside down to work on it, which made the showing of the 'rushes' at the Coracle Press Gallery in Camberwell (November 27th 1976).

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