The World as Surface, chapter 24 from The Works, 2011

A Journey in Seeing

A long-term visual memoir by Tineke Storteboom.

Each chapter is published as it is written. Together they form an ongoing book about the development of an artistic practice over nearly four decades.

By 2011 the line had quietly taken over.

It no longer described objects.It no longer followed form.

It began to live a life of its own.

I drew networks of ink that spread across paper like roots,rivers,or invisible pathways.Sometimes they became paintings.Sometimes they became T-shirts.Sometimes they travelled through books,photographs,or the walls of my own gallery.

The line no longer belonged to one medium.

It simply continued.

That same year,I opened a small gallery on the ground floor of my home in Amsterdam.At first it showed only my work.Later it also became a place where art and clothing met.I printed my drawings onto T-shirts,not as fashion,but as another way for the drawings to enter everyday life.

Around that time I found an old discarded book.Its pages were already filled with another history.Instead of covering it,I drew portraits directly onto the printed words.

The existing text became part of the drawing.

Nothing needed to begin from emptiness anymore.

Everything already carried a memory. The drawing did not end on the page.It continued as a photograph, a print, and eventually as an object on someone else's wall.

Looking back,I see that these works were not about lines.

They were about relationships.

The line revealed what had always been there:that nothing exists by itself.

Everything touches something else.

Everything leaves a trace.

Everything continues.

“The brush never arrives on an empty page. It meets a world that has already begun"