Houtskool is one person and one room, on the second floor of an old clothing factory in Woodstock. I draw in charcoal and Indian ink, mostly from photographs I take on long drives, and mostly of things that are already halfway to being a drawing — pylons, windpumps, aloes, nine crows on a fence. The table in the photograph is where all of it happens: it is too small, it is under a fortnight of black dust, and the drawings I kept and the ones I scrubbed out were all made on it. Charcoal is mostly subtraction. You lay a grey down over everything and then take the light back out with an eraser and a chamois, and once you have taken too much out there is no putting it back, which is why one of these took three weeks and another took a morning. Originals are one of one and I do not print them afterwards. The drypoints are pulled by hand off a copper plate in editions of thirty or forty, because that is about as many as the plate will give before the line goes soft.
Send the size in millimetres, the subject, and roughly what you are willing to spend. Commissions run four to eight weeks. Studio visits in Woodstock by arrangement, most weekday afternoons.
