Gallery

A stretch of coast in plan, engraved as a survey chart. Relief is drawn with hachures: short strokes set along each contour of height and run straight down the fall line to the next, so they stand in courses. Steeper ground takes closer and heavier strokes, and ground turned away from a light in the north-west takes more again, so the shadowed flank of a spur goes dark and a level bench is bare paper. Streams cut the land into valleys and part the hachures on either side. The low ground behind the shore is stippled as sand, and the high ground inland is set with tufts of grass. Offshore, flats are stippled in front of the gentle stretches of shore, out to a dotted low-water line. Beyond it the sea is water-lined: lines laid parallel to the low-water line, each finer than the one inside it and each gap wider, until the lining gives out. Soundings in fathoms are set in the gaps and across the open sea, with dotted depth curves at ten and twenty fathoms, and rocks awash lie off the foot of the cliffs. The coast runs across the sheet rather than round an island in the middle of it, so land comes in from the edges. The seed decides the bearing of the coast, the escarpment behind it, the spurs that come down to make the headlands, and the bay; every stream, cove and sounding follows from that ground.

A river delta in plan, engraved as a survey chart. The river comes down out of a valley between bluffs, meanders across the plain behind the old coast, and at the coast divides into channels that divide again as they run out across the land they have built into the sea. A wide channel is drawn with two banks and a line of lining inside each; the narrowest with a single line. Loops the river has cut off lie beside it as crescents of still water. Between the channels the ground is too low to drain and carries the marsh sign: a short level rule with fine strokes standing up from it. The banks of the channels stand a little higher and carry grass. Where the sea works the delta front, old shorelines lie one behind another as fine lines on stippled sand. Ponds and lagoons are ruled across with level lines. The bluffs are hachured, and streams come down off the upland and lose themselves in the marsh. Offshore, flats are stippled out to a dotted low-water line, parted where each channel runs on across them and widened over the bar at each mouth. The sea beyond is water-lined, with soundings in fathoms and dotted depth curves that swing out round the delta. The seed decides how far the river builds against the sea: a few long fingers, each channel carried out between its own banks; a rounded lobe of many mouths; or a broad smooth arc with ridges across it. It also sets the bearing of the coast, the course of the valley, and every channel.

A ridge above a coast in plan, drawn with hachures and nothing else. The strokes run straight down the fall line, the way water would run off the ground, and stand in courses between breaks of height. They crowd where the ground is steeper and where it turns away from a light in the north-west, and flat ground gets none, so the crest of the ridge and the level upland behind it are bare paper. Spurs come down off the ridge toward the sea, each with a lit flank and a dark one. Offshore the sea is water-lined: lines laid parallel to the shore, each gap a little wider than the last, until the lining gives out. There are no streams, soundings or depth curves, and no border but the plate mark. The sheet is the relief alone, which is the one thing a hachured map draws that no other kind of drawing does. The seed decides the bearing of the coast, where the ridge stands, and how the spurs come down off it. Each seed is a different piece of ground.

A chart of a bank of sand lying off a coast, with the sea made of figures. The boat runs lines across the bank and sets down a depth at every cast, so the soundings lie in rows. Over the bank every line is sounded; in water under nine fathoms one line in two, and in deep water one in four, with the casts spaced wider as the water deepens. Where a bank falls steeply to deep water, one line in two is run on past the foot of the slope, each line for its own distance, so the steep side is surveyed more closely than the depth alone would ask. The bank shows twice: in the depth curves drawn through the figures, and in how thickly the figures lie. Depths under eleven fathoms are given in fathoms and feet, the feet set small beside the fathoms. The highest parts of the bank dry at low water. They are stippled inside a dotted low-water line, the bank round them is stippled more lightly out to three fathoms, and the few figures on the heads give the height the sand dries, in feet, underlined. The depth curves at three, five, ten and twenty fathoms each have their own pattern of dash, as the old charts drew them, and each is broken where it passes through a figure. Behind a water-lined coast the land rises to an escarpment, hachured, with spurs coming down toward the shore and streams in the valleys between them. It is the one dark mass on the sheet. The seed decides the bearing of the coast and so where the land lies, how many banks lie off it and where, the bearing of each, which flank is the steep one, where the crest rises into heads, and where a swatchway is cut across between them.

A geological map of ground that does not exist. A stack of beds was laid down flat, tilted as one, bent a little by a broad fold and broken by a fault, and the ground was then worn down across them. The map shows what is left at the surface. Each bed is told from the next only by how it is engraved: ruled at its own angle and spacing, or dotted, darkest for the oldest, with one bed left as bare paper, the way the black-and-white geological sketch-maps of the nineteenth century told their rocks apart. A fine line marks each contact, and the fault is the heaviest line on the sheet. On some sheets it crosses the whole plate; on others its throw dies away and it stops short. Hard beds stand up as scarps and are hachured; soft ones wear down into vales between them, and here and there a hill of a hard bed is left standing on its own, ringed by its scarp. Where a stream cuts across a bed the outcrop bends into a V, because the outcrop is only where the bed meets the ground. A few strike-and-dip marks give the bearing of the beds and their dip in degrees. The seed decides the fall of the ground, which way the beds dip and how steeply, which of them are hard, the fold, where the fault runs, how far it moved the beds, and whether it dies out.

New snow over a slope, seen at a slant from close by, and a brook running down through it that has not frozen. The water is the only thing exposed at any size, so it is the only real dark in the picture: everything else is paper, because everything else is covered. Dried dock and a little grass stand along the banks where the snow thins over the undercut edge, a few stones in the stream carry caps of snow, and a shelf of slush and thin ice comes and goes along the edges. This is the extreme of the series' rule. If every mark has to be something the snow has not covered, the morning after a fall leaves almost nothing to draw, and the one thing left is the water.

Late winter, the snow going off a ploughed field. The ground has come through along the furrows, and what is left of the snow lies in long ranks far off and in wide broken fields close to, thicker where the thaw has not yet reached. Meltwater stands in the furrows between them, and some of it has frozen over. A hedge line holds the horizon with bare trees standing out of it, and the low sun puts the one warm note in the whole series into the air above it. This is the densest piece in the series because it is the one where the most ground is exposed. The dark is made the same way as the water in Fresh Fall: it is only what the snow has stopped covering.

A board wall, close to, with a drift banked against it from the lower left up to the right. Snow does not lie on a vertical face, so the boards stay bare and weathered dark, and the drift is simply where they stop. The wall runs out of the top of the frame, so there is no sky here, no horizon and no warm note. This is the only piece in the series with a made thing in it, and the only one with a made-looking edge. Wind cuts a drift almost as clean as a saw, and its crest is the strongest line in the series.

Near-zero visibility. The only things in the frame are the ones close enough to see: the tops of a buried fence running away from the eye, gone after six posts, and grass along the bottom leaning with the wind, banked over in places by low drifts, the nearest clumps running out of the frame at your feet. Beyond that there is nothing, and the paper says so. It is the inverse of Thaw. There the exposed ground runs all the way to the horizon. Here there is no horizon, and exposure stops a few yards out.

The view is down into a working pit. A benched wall stands under bare sky, a pale floor opens toward the viewer, and one near wall cuts across the lower right as a single dark mass. That mass is the only black in the plate, and every other value is graded away from it. Two rules govern every mark, and nothing else in the plate is allowed to vary. The direction of a hatch is the orientation of the surface it describes: the sheer faces run vertical because quarried stone splits on the plumb, the bench tops run level because they are bedding planes, and the floor runs with the floor. The density of a hatch is how far that surface is turned from the light, which falls from the upper right, so the wall darkens to the left and the near mass, turned away entirely, is darkest. Nothing varies decoratively.

A field of barley under a moving wind, seen from a rise at its edge. The subject is the wind, which cannot be drawn. What can be drawn is what the wind does to a crop: where a gust presses the barley over, the stalks turn their sides up and the ears stop facing the viewer, and that patch goes pale; where the crop still stands, the eye looks down into it and it goes dark. So the gusts are pale sweeps running across a dark field, and their shape is the shape of the air. One pair of wheelings runs to the vanishing point — the only straight thing in the plate, and the only evidence of a person. The same two rules govern every mark here as govern the quarry. The direction of a hatch is the lean of the stalks it describes, so it reports the wind and nothing else, and the marks bend together where a gust crosses them. The density of a hatch is how far that crop is turned from the light. The one place in the plate where direction is not reporting the lean of something is the hedge, where the marks are thrown wide, and that scatter is the difference between a hedge and a wall. The field is drawn nearly flat in value from near to far. Distance is carried by the wheelings converging, by the gust bands foreshortening, and by the marks fining down — not by darkening the foreground, which turns level ground into a bank rising toward the viewer.

A line squall crossing open ground. The shelf cloud has already come over, so it fills the sky to the top of the sheet and its base runs across the plate as a hard edge — the one hard edge in the series, and hard because a shelf cloud really has one. Rain falls from it in separate falls rather than as a single sheet, and the gaps between them are how you read the distance into it. At one end the cloud, the rain and the ground are a single continuous dark. At the other the rain has not arrived, and the strip of bare paper between the cloud base and the horizon is the only light in the picture. Everything is graded on the distance from that strip. The cloud is lit from underneath by it, so it pales toward the light and deepens away from it; the rain thins toward it; the ground lifts under it and darkens where a fall is standing on it. Nothing in the plate varies for its own sake. The hatch is the direction of the air. It runs with the front where it leaves the shelf and flattens into the body of the cloud above, and it falls with the rain, leaning hard where the rain leaves the cloud and standing up as it nears the ground, because the wind is stronger aloft. That curve is the whole reason a squall reads as moving rather than as hanging.

A wood seen against a low sun. The light is behind the trees, so every trunk stands as a dark column, with at most a hair of lit edge on the side facing it, and every trunk throws its shadow straight at the viewer. Those shadows lie flat on the ground, so in the picture they are not parallel: they fan out from the one point on the horizon under the sun, which is also where the air is brightest. One light sets the value of everything in the plate, and where it stands is the composition. The seed moves the sun, the horizon and every tree, so each seed is a different wood lit from a different place, and the shadows fan out again from wherever the light has gone.

Winter plum, painted after Wang Mian's *A Prunus in the Moonlight* (Yuan dynasty, Cleveland Museum of Art 1974.26), whose composition it follows: an old bough arching low across the bottom of the scroll, a limb climbing out of it in an S, and new whips rising off both, crowded with blossom. The contrast the picture turns on is old wood against new growth. The wood is the darkest thing on the sheet and the blossoms are the lightest, lighter than the silk around them, under a moon barely paler than the ground. A seed changes which edge the arch enters from, the small shifts of every limb, and where each shoot, blossom and silk thread falls.

Spring orchid, painted after Ma Shouzhen's *Orchid and Rock* (Ming dynasty), whose composition it follows: a clump of long leaves rising from a sloping bank beside a grey wash boulder, two flower stalks arching out over the rock, a small bamboo sprig on the open side and clover at the foot. Above it, where her scroll carries a written colophon, a cream panel is strewn with dark flakes and no characters. The leaves are the darkest thing on the sheet and the rock the softest. A seed changes which side the rock stands on, the clump's lean, spread and height, how many flowers each stalk carries, the rock's size and distance from the plant, the slope of the ground, and where every leaf, flake and stone falls.

Summer bamboo: one branch entering from the edge, painted after Ke Jiusi's *Bamboo after Wen Tong* (Yuan dynasty, 1343, The Metropolitan Museum of Art 2006.571). Every leaf is a single stroke, grouped into the clusters the *Mustard Seed Garden Manual* names, and hung on long twigs so open paper shows between the clusters. Depth is the only reason a leaf is pale: whole twigs are painted in a paler ink and sit behind the dark ones. A seed changes the culm's arc, where each twig leaves it, and how every cluster fans.

Bamboo growing from behind a scholar's rock, painted after Deng Yu's *Bamboo and Rock* (Yuan dynasty, ca. 1360-67, The Metropolitan Museum of Art). Leaves hang down and outward from their twigs in overlapping masses over the top of the scroll, and bare jointed stems climb the empty band beside the rock. The rock is built from line, not wash: each mass is combed with strokes that follow its form, and the dark between masses is those same strokes bunched tight. A seed changes the culms, the twigs and leaf masses, and the stack of the rock's lobes.

Autumn chrysanthemum, painted after Xu Wei's *Chrysanthemums and Bamboo* (Ming dynasty), whose composition it follows: one tall stalk rising from the grass at the foot and leaning into a crowded cluster of heads, bamboo sprays thrown in from the upper and middle left, a dark wet mass of grass and ink low at the left, and a small black sprig beside the stalk. Where his scroll carries a written poem at the top right, the paper is left empty. A seed changes which side the plant stands on, the stalk's foot, bow, lean and height, which heads the cluster keeps, every leaf's angle, fold and value, the grass clumps and the wind they lean in, the dark mass and its paper gaps, and the bamboo sprays.

A tall pointed lancet built the way the medallion windows of the early thirteenth century were built, read from the bottom up. Three scene compartments stack inside an armature of interlocking circles: a meeting, a teaching under a tiled floor, and a sending out, with a blessing head in the roundel of the arch and red roundels where the circles meet. A trefoil-leaf border with pearled edges runs round the whole light, and a trellis ground fills between the compartments. The iron crosses only at the joins between medallions and never down the axis or through a scene, so the bars hold the window without cutting its story. A seed reglazes the same design: every piece's density, streak, seeds and weathering, and the painted detail, change; the cartoon does not.

A procession moves right along a road toward a city tower. A saint rides sideways on a white donkey, blessing, his tunic falling over its flank; the donkey bows its head over a red cloak spread on the road under its hooves. Behind him the followers are one full figure and heads stacked above and behind, and at the gate the greeters are one figure raising a palm on the step before the tower and heads behind him, the crowd suggested with few pieces as the glaziers of Laon and Troyes suggested it. A boy sits in the leaves of a tree above the donkey, holding up a branch he has cut. A seed reglazes the same design; the composition stays.

A feast under two red arches, with the roofs of a town along the top of the roundel. Four figures sit behind a long white table, all cut at the waist by the cloth: a servant leaning in behind the saint's shoulder, the saint blessing the goblet in front of him, a guest, and the bride raising a hand, so the row of heads breaks. On the table the bread and vessels stand at two depths and overlap, each shaded away from the light and throwing a painted shadow on the cloth. The glass is kept lighter and the leads thinner than the thirteenth-century panel it follows, which has darkened; the white cloth carries the light of the scene. A seed reglazes the same design; the composition stays.

A saint stands on a green shore at the left, the largest figure, pointing across the water. Two fishermen in a boat turn back toward him, cut off at the waist by the gunwale as every Chartres boat cuts its crew, a mast rising between them with its sail bunched under the yard. The hull is a shallow crescent across the widest part of the roundel, and the water under it is stacked bands of white crest, green and blue. The call is carried by the gap between the pointing hand and the turned heads. A seed reglazes the same design; the composition stays.

An elder saint left of centre, larger than the young man he blesses, turned right with his hand raised; the young man leans in from the right with his hands joined. The raised hand and the joined hands stack on one vertical just right of the centre, and that gap is the subject. A brick tower with a red roof closes the right side, a tree answers it on the left, lower and softer, and three green hills make the ground line under the ring. The sky is cut into a few large wedges so the figures and the setting carry the small pieces. A seed reglazes the same design; the composition stays.

Three fronds of one bracken, laid on a sheet, strapped down with paper and named. One species to a sheet: that is what a determination means, and the first draft of this plate had a club-moss in the corner as a "detail", which is botanical nonsense on a Pteridium sheet. Nothing on it is plumb. A specimen is laid down by hand and pressed where it falls, so each frond sits at its own slight angle, and every one of them is strapped, because a specimen left floating is the thing that reads as wrong before you can say why. There is no green. A plant dried on a sheet for a century is brown, and the only other colour in the plate is the straw of the mounting strips.

Six species to one sheet instead of one, which is the other thing a herbarium sheet is for: not a determination but a comparison, six pteridophytes set out in a grid so that the differences between them are the subject. They are laid at slightly different angles for the same reason as on the other sheet. Six plumb specimens in a grid read as a chart of icons; a hand pressed these one at a time. The six were chosen by drawing all ten fern presets and keeping the ones that are distinct from each other at a glance, which is the whole job of a comparative sheet. Three were rejected: two carry a clubbed trunk that reads as a broken umbrella, and one is too sparse to hold a cell.

The half of a plant that is never collected, collected. A herbarium sheet is almost always the part that was above ground, because that is the part that comes away with the plant when you pull it; the roots stay in the soil, or come up as a broken handful of what was actually there. Four that did come up, laid out and named. Each seed digs up four different plants rather than redrawing the same four, which is why this is the one sheet in the series whose seed row re-cuts the composition instead of only re-growing it: a root's spread is most of its shape, so when the spread changes the sheet changes with it. They are not arranged the way the fronds are. A frond stands, so the two fern sheets are columns. A root spreads, so this one is registers, and the annotations move into the left margin because that is the only place on the sheet a root is not already occupying.

One cutting, laid across the sheet and cropped by it. The other three sheets are multiples set square to the paper — three fronds, a grid of six, four registers — and this is the one that gives the whole page to a single piece. It is cut at both ends and it runs off two edges, which is the honest thing for a cutting to do. What you get off a wall is a length of something longer, and a sheet is only ever a window onto the plant it came from. It is strapped where the stem is bare, because that is where you can actually put a strap.

A canal-side town after everyone has gone to bed, seen across the water. The far bank's storehouses and dwellings stand shoulder to shoulder on the quay, plaster pale where it turns to the moon, and every window is dark. The only warm thing in the frame is the paper lantern hung from the bow of the last ferry, and it is where the people are: a ferryman in a straw coat poling from the stern and one passenger going home with a bundle. The lantern is repeated once, broken, in the water below it, and that is the whole of the colour the picture allows itself. Everything else is cool and near-monochrome, so the eye has one place to go and a reason to go there.

A temple precinct at night with the snow still coming down. The great gate stands square across the far side, its two roofs heavy and white, the dark passages beneath it open, the pines either side bowed under cushions of snow. One person is crossing toward it under a yellow umbrella, the only warm thing in the frame, and the colour is repeated once, faintly, in the snow at their feet. Their footprints come back toward us. The gate is not red. Everything but the umbrella stays cool, so the one warm note is where the person is and the eye has nowhere else to go.

A canal at the end of the day with the rain coming straight down. A white storehouse stands on the far quay, too big for the frame, its plaster stained where the water runs, a ladder leaning up to its eave. The storehouse door is open and lamplit: someone inside stoops to a rice bale, and someone on the quay brings another toward the door, hugged in both arms. That doorway is the only warm thing in the frame, and the canal gives it back as a broken ribbon of light. The stains are grey, not ochre. Everything but the lit door stays cool, so the warm note is where the people are working and nowhere else.

The theatre street under a full moon, seen from a balcony. The teahouses have put up their shutters for the night; one on the left is still open, and its lamplight spills out across the street. Three people stand in that light. The rest are walking home down the middle of the street, and the moon throws each of their shadows long toward us, a white dog and three puppies among them. The cold shadows cross the one warm patch on the ground. The moon is the paper left uncut. Everything but the open teahouse is blue and grey, so the only warmth on the street is where people have stopped.

A room upstairs at night. Through the window bars the rice fields lie under the moon, Fuji small and pale beyond them, the festival crowd crossing the fields with their rakes on their shoulders, geese going over. A cat sits on the sill with its back to us, looking out. Nobody is in the room, or nobody we can see. A lamp is lit somewhere to the right: it warms the shoji beside the window, where the shadow of a woman holding up a hand mirror falls softly on the paper, and its glow runs along the sill and catches the cat's back and the sides of the bars. That lamplight is the only warm thing in the frame, and the people are in it.

A vertical cut through seven beds, broken by a single normal fault. The fault is the only event in the frame and it sits on the rabatment line, so the plate divides where the eye already expects a division and the drawing spends nothing on arranging itself. The textures are not decoration and none of them was chosen for looks. Each bed is hatched by what it is made of, following the convention a section drawing already uses: stipple for sand, tight horizontal laminations for shale, wide spacing for limestone, dense crosshatch for crystalline basement. Two further rules run downward through the whole stack. Beds darken and their hatch closes up with depth, so value reads as burial. Beds thicken with depth, because older beds have had longer to accumulate and more weight to compact them. Where a bed meets the fault it terminates on the fault plane rather than crossing it, and because that plane leans, the upthrown and downthrown halves meet it at two different points.

Existing ground against a proposed grade. The ground crosses the grade five times, and each crossing changes what the earthwork is doing: above the line the earth has to come out, below it the earth has to go in. One rule carries the plate, and hatch angle is reserved for it alone. Where ground stands above the grade the region is hatched with the cut angle; where it falls below, the hatch runs against that angle. Nothing else in the frame is permitted to change direction, so the two territories separate at a glance and stay separated. A second distinction supports it: fill is material that will be placed and is worked densely, cut is material about to be taken away and is worked thin enough to read as a ghost. Above the profile, the mass haul curve keeps the running balance of the two, which is the reason an earthwork section is drawn at all. The beds beneath darken with depth on the same rule as the rest of the series, because it is meant to be the same ground.

A masonry arcade, drawn for the one thing an arcade is for: collecting load and handing it to the ground. The load enters at the top edge of the frame and leaves at the bottom, and the drawing follows it the whole way without a break. Line weight is reserved for load and means nothing else. A line arrives carrying almost nothing and is drawn at its lightest. As the arcade gathers, each line migrates toward the pier it belongs to and thickens, and it is heaviest in the shaft, where every line in a bay has become one column of stone. Below the footing the rule reverses: the lines fan and lighten, because the same load is now spread across more ground and no single line carries as much. The masonry itself is coursed horizontally and never varies, so the only thing moving in the frame is the load. The lines belonging to one pier are ranked before they spread so that they fan without crossing; the bulbs from neighbouring piers meet only at depth, which is where they meet in the ground.

Five boreholes and the ground between them. The five columns are the only places anyone has actually been. Everything else in the frame is inference, and the plate is drawn so that you cannot mistake one for the other. That is the first rule and it decides almost every mark: weight separates measured ground from inferred ground. A log is drawn solid, at full strength, because someone brought that material up and looked at it. The ground between two logs is drawn from the same lithologic hatch at a third of the density and with no body colour at all, so the paper shows through everything nobody has seen. The larger part of the frame is bare, which is the honest content of a correlation panel and the reason one is worth drawing. A second rule governs the columns themselves: a segment's horizontal extent encodes grain size, so each log's silhouette steps out through clay, sand and gravel and can be read as a profile rather than as a decorated bar. Where a bed is missing from a hole it tapers to a point at that hole instead of stopping at an edge, because that is what a pinch-out is: the sand is gone from the middle hole, and the gravel is a channel that exists only in the middle three. Collar elevations differ, so the tops do not line up and the correlation lines rather than the frame carry the stratigraphy.

Five events in one section, and the drawing dates them without a word. Old beds were laid down and tilted; a fault broke them; erosion planed the whole block off; a pebble band filled the worn surface and flat beds settled on it; last, a dike forced its way up through everything. The plate states that order with a single rule, the one a geologist reads a section by: where two features meet, the younger runs through unbroken and the older stops dead against it. So the tilted beds stop at the fault, the fault and the beds both stop at the erosion surface, and every one of them, the flat beds included, stops at the dike, whose two walls are the only lines in the frame that nothing interrupts. Every junction is a T, never a crossing, because two lines that both carry on through a meeting say nothing about which came first. Every structural line is drawn at one weight, tint follows only what the rock is made of, and nothing darkens with depth, so continuity is the only thing in the frame that can speak about age. The flat beds never touch the erosion surface: the pebble band fills its hollows, as a basal conglomerate does, so no young line ever stops on something older than itself.

Slack water is the still interval when the tide has stopped going out and has not yet begun to come in. Nothing in the frame is doing anything. The piece is one decision about where to put the horizon, and then a refusal to give the water an event to look at. What carries it instead is line. Four passes of hatching cross at angles a degree or two apart, and none of their density is free: weight and opacity are both tied to distance, so the lines are almost bare at the horizon and closing to black at the near edge. The surface is described entirely by how hard it is drawn. The only warm note in the palette is the ochre in the low band of air at the horizon, which the far water carries and the near water never reaches.

This is the piece with no distance in it. The bank has taken the far water and the horizon with it, so rather than look out at nothing the eye is turned down, onto the surface a few yards off. The frame is square because there is no distance for a wide one to hold and no height for a tall one. The drawing spreads out instead of banking at the near edge. Everywhere in this picture is near, so the depth rule that gives the other pieces their weight has almost nothing to work against, and the hatch stays even and faint across the whole square. Ochre is all but gone. The rule has never been that the series contains ochre; it is that ochre appears where light lands on water, and in fog almost none does.

The tide is out far enough that the drained flats fill four fifths of a very wide frame, and the eye is down on them rather than looking across open water. This is the piece with the most drawing in it and the longest light across it. It is also the only piece whose marks do not run level. Wet sand at low tide is cut by channels draining seaward, so the hatch turns to follow them and rakes back across the frame instead of lying flat on it. The angle is not decoration: it is the direction the water leaves by. The ochre is also given more room here than anywhere else. The band is wider and lower than anywhere else in the series because the light is coming in flat across wet sand rather than down onto open water. It still appears in exactly one place and still stops at the water's edge.

The fourth state of light, and the one that could most easily have been made by cheating. A night piece wants a black ground, and a black ground would have ended the series: every other piece earns its value from how densely it is drawn, and one that arrived at darkness by starting dark would not belong with them. The frame is upright and the eye is low, close enough to the surface that the water starts just beneath the viewer and runs the whole height of the picture to a small horizon near the top. Almost nothing here is sky. So the ground stays the same pale paper as the others and the darkness is built from ink. The hatch runs at roughly half again the opacity of the daylight pieces and the cross-hatch reaches further up the frame, which is why the near water goes almost black while the marks are still legible in it. The ochre is at its narrowest in the series: one struck band where a light on the far shore reaches the water.

The edge of a field on a day when the cloud has come down to the ground. A hedge runs away from where you stand on a long diagonal and goes into the cloud; one bare tree stands in it on the left, near enough to see its bark. Past the tree the hedge breaks into separate touches, then into nothing, and the far half of the sheet is fog. The ground in front is rough pasture, darkest at your feet. The drawing is darkest where you are and lightest where the hedge goes out. Nothing in it is black.

A grass ride cut straight through a pine plantation, on a morning of mist. You stand between the wheel tracks and they run away from you to a gap in the trees a little above the middle of the sheet, where the mist is lightest. The pines stand in two walls. The near ones are only trunks, their crowns far above the frame; further in you can see their lower branches; the furthest are a few upright strokes, and then nothing. One trunk on each side is drawn firmly, in modelled tone darkening to its shaded edge. Everything else stays pale, and the gap at the end of the ride is the lightest thing on the sheet.

A lake on a day without a breath of wind. Reeds stand thick along the near bank on one side, their plumes hanging; across the open water a low hill lies on the far shore, and the water gives it back upside down, whole. Most of the sheet is sky. The stillness is the weather here. Nothing on the water moves but a few level glints where the light catches it, and the marks on the water get smaller and paler toward the far shore until you can't tell where the lake ends.

A hollow at first light, after a clear and windless night. The cold air has drained off the slopes and lies in the valley floor as ground mist, level as a lake, and the hedgerow trees stand up out of it with their feet lost. Above the mist line the far slope is clear, its upper fields already catching the light while the hollow is still in shadow. The bank where you are standing is white with frost. The weather here is the cold itself: it is what put the mist in the bottom, took the feet off the trees and rimed the grass at your boots.