Drawing "Oscillia"

Here Konstantin Chaykin turns to the principle of anthropomorphism, giving a watch mechanism a face and a figure. The heroine's very name, Oscillia, derives from the term "oscillation," denoting the swing of the balance and hairspring, the component whose perfectly tuned frequency determines the accuracy of a watch's entire rate. The spoked balance wheel, set within a broad ring, becomes the heroine's head here, and the ruby jewel at its centre, the sheet's single note of colour against an otherwise near-monochrome ground, reads at once as an eye and as the heart of the whole mechanism.

Oscilli's clothes, recalling a full skirt or a bell, conceals within it a further component, a small gear wheel set inside an inner oval, as though a working mechanism could be sensed beneath the fabric of the garment. At the very base of the figure sit three screws: two small ones placed symmetrically at the edges, and one large slotted screw at the centre, like a clasp or buckle holding together this vestment of watch components. The watercolour here is applied sparingly, in almost transparent glazes, so that the paper shows through the thinnest layer of paint in places, and this very lightness of touch becomes a metaphor for oscillation itself: much as the swing of the balance is imperceptible to the eye yet utterly necessary to the running of a watch, Oscillia's translucent watercolour trace all but dissolves into the paper, while remaining the sole condition under which the Horological Archetype takes on its recognisable form.