Today, I have finished the series of drawings «Heads». The last one is number 445. With that amount of drawings, it will be possible to continue posting one drawing every week day and two on the Sunday, on Facebook and Twitter, until August 2 2015, as I have been doing it since September 2014. This will also allow me to make a final sprint during the last month of the project. From July 3 to August 2, two drawings of a head will be posted everyday.
It was not meant to be that way. Four hundreth and nineteen drawings should have been enough to complete the project. But when I felt that the end was getting closer, the nature of the process changed and new requirements started to appear. It seemed to me that it was not a possibility that the series would just stop when the expected number of drawings and when the final date would be reached. It became clear that the series should go somewhere, taht it sould reach an ending that should have an organic character in relation to the whole of the project. Until around three hundreth and fifty drawings, it was all right that it would move forward in a quite open ended manner. That was the crucial thing, that it kept going without repeating itself. Until that point, the progress was based on an alternance of sudden progresses in new directions that appeared in a more or less fortuitous way, and of phases of hesitation and stamping while looking for a new momentum. It was a kind of infinite process that was feeding itself out of a retroaction with former drawings that I was revisiting when I would post them sometime months after I had made them. It was a sort of a circular process that I could have decided to continue until it would die out by itself, until there would not be any new momentum. But I had decided that the project would last exactly one year. When I made this decision, the process seemed almost infinite. The focus was all on succeding to maintain the series over what appear to be quite a long period of time, and to keep going even in the phases of stagnation. I did not expect the change of dynamic that happened spontaneously and that imposed a different kind of focalisation. So, I spent the last months looking for an ending to the series. I turned out to be more difficult than I would have expected. I started by setting a clearer and more precise rythmic pattern in the series, thinking that it could help. The idea of a kind of pregessive vanishing of the heads appeared quite early on but I thought it was a bit superficial, too easy. To make this idea acceptable, I first had to let the internal swarming of the heads to contaminate the external space that up to that point had remained untouched. This was a less obvious idea and finally it took 25 drawings more than was foreseen to achieve this.
