Barest bones

Any fears of getting too pretty have been assuaged. Today's offering is a mess!
I include it here for the sake of honesty, though I'm wincing a little at the exposure of my clumsiness. Truth be told, I don't know if this one will work out, but I'm excited about it.
It represents forty fast minutes of drawing time - all I had, today, between one thing and another.
I am getting into the habit of 'half-hour starts', when I don't have a lot of studio time (stop me if I've told you this already). Today, for instance, I could have spent my brief opportunity on the dandelion, but I know that the slowest part of a drawing is its final stages. I would be unlikely to have finished it, and it would be harder to feel I'd made any progress at all.
But in half an hour, I can make something where there was nothing, and that is a very significant development!
So I started something new.

Here (let me decode the scribble) is a plane tree leaf, fallen in this premature Autumn onto the glaring concrete surrounding the local mega-chain supermarket. I noticed it because it, too, was starkly white in the searing afternoon sun, and appeared almost to be fashioned out of the path itself. It is a murky orange on its face, but its strange, albino back has the appearance of creased paper, and against a white background, the shadows are all that distinguish it.
The surface of the leaf is a rearing, bucking landscape, full of volumes and hollows, and I struggled, when I began, to reconcile them with preconceived assumptions about what a leaf looks like. I started by drawing it simply as a pattern of light and shade, transcribing the surface information as a camera does. But the sense of body, of presence, eluded me, and I was discouraged by the clumsiness of my attempts.
So I resorted to a more abstract, linear mapping of what I know about the leaf - here the peak of the hill, here the gentle swell, here the sudden decline. It is one of my favourite approaches to a drawing, though often little of it will remain visible in the end. It helps me to grapple with the mystery of presence itself. It is more physical and satisfying, and tracks something more elusive than the fall of light.
It tracks my desire to wrest form out of flatness like a magician.