A sketchbook page packed with gesture studies in pen, some barely a few lines, others worked to the point where a figure genuinely stands up and holds the eye. The central standing pose — one arm raised, body upright — is the one that got the most return visits from the pen. It has cross-hatched tone in the torso, a worked face, a sense of the arm's reach continuing beyond the page. To the upper right, a reclining figure has been given similar attention: the pen built darkness through layers of short strokes, creating weight in the head and shoulders. Between and around these, lighter figures drift — some are single contour loops, a body caught in one unbroken line, others are just a hip and a shoulder, the minimum information for a pose to exist.

What's interesting is the variation in commitment across the page — the same question asked nine or ten times: how much does this pose need before it arrives? And the answers are genuinely different. Some of the lightest marks — a bent figure in the lower centre, drawn with maybe five or six lines — carry as much sense of the body's position as the fully hatched standing study. Others feel unfinished, like the pen moved on before the figure settled. The page holds the ones that landed alongside the ones that didn't quite, and the tension between them is more interesting than if every gesture had been brought to the same level of resolution.

There's something in the scratchier texture of the pen work itself that matters. This isn't a pen that glides — it catches the sketchbook surface, leaves a slightly rough, fibrous line that gives even the lightest marks a physical presence. The figures barely indicated still feel scored into the paper rather than floated onto it. By the end of the page the hand seems to have found a rhythm with the material: the bottom-left figure — foreshortened, head toward the viewer, fist rendered with real attention — has a compactness that suggests the pen and the eye arrived at the same speed.