Within a set of specified components resides the source of all colors and the first element of drawing.

A specified instruction results in a single type of action.

But what is the impulse to make the drawing?

From prescribed settings such as these, the impulse may lie in a desire to see the outcome, to draw from the basis of an idea in order to realize the idea.

But like some deceptively simple notion of chaos, in which a defined set of circumstances evolves to a variable end simply by occurring, Sol LeWitt’s circumstantial drawings begin as prescribed, yet they occur according to the hand that draws them. Is the impulse to draw simply mechanical? Or is the impulse rather to reveal the hand and the variable end?

Uniquely, in LeWitt’s primary gouaches another important element arises: he withholds his own long-established directive that the execution of his work be carried out by others, and he reserves the gouaches for himself alone to create. Given this extra condition, the prescription becomes exclusively confined to the artist’s hand, and there evolves an entirely new circumstance.

Within specified components and specified instructions a drawing occurs.

But by way of one extra condition, the impulse to draw flaps its butterfly wings, and the outcome vibrates with the imprint of only the artist’s hand.

Maybe it was just desire.