Extraordinary Plumbago
JUSTINE MOSS
The magically described discovery of a seam of graphite in Seathwaite, Cumbria in the sixteenth century, a mineral whose mark-making qualities were refined with the addition of clay and encased in wood to become the pencil, began a week-long practical and reflective exploration of its use by artists since.
Five pairs of pencil drawings, chosen by AUB Professor of Drawing, Siân Bowen for their thematic similarities, but differences in approach to the medium, were studied each day to be responded to using pencil on paper.
Thomas Gainsborough’s Landscape with a Decayed Willow over a Pool, 1756 - a fantastic landscape whose pictorial elements at various scales are unified by its fine veil of consistent light pencil swirls and has at its centre a tree trunk leaning over a pool delineated in more definite, dark pencil lines - is juxtaposed with Giuseppe Penone’s Le Terre, 1986, the marks of which are seemingly rapidly executed using the side of the pencil to depict a leaning tree-trunk-pool object on an unmarked ground.
In Samuel Palmer’s Villa d'Este at Tivoli from the Cypress Avenue, 1846; the darkness of the trees surrounding the villa are built from layers of small, specifically shaped marks to suggest the circumference of tree trunks and leaf species, textures of the stony ground and density of shade. This drawing is paired with Anna Barriball’s rubbing of a fireplace at the Fruitmarket Gallery, 2012 where the physically persistent use of a 2b pencil shading obliterates the paper along with the marks of its own making, in the solid metallic sheen of layered graphite.
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Through slow looking, with technology enabling digital photographs of the drawings to be examined closely, the drawings reveal how the subjects are conveyed to the viewer through the artists’ various uses of pencil. The meanings suggested by shape, length, speed and pressure of marks, fluidity of line and layering of tone are understood through our knowledge of a vocabulary of drawing and expanded on by further reading and listening to interviews with some of the contemporary artists. Through looking, existing knowledge and new information, the technical way marks were made can be deduced.
Writer on drawing, Phillip Rawson’s contention that the initial mark of a drawing could be identified if studied closely and carefully, suggested an alternative, time-based mode to unravel the making of a drawing through looking; by the systematic mental erasure of each mark, as though its making were a film that could be played backwards in slow motion to its beginning.
Substituting ourselves as the artist by making a version of their drawing, not only by replicating the mark-making from beginning to end, but by re-enacting the choreography of the actions that made up the drawing and inhabiting what Rawson calls the ‘implied pattern of those movements through which it [the drawing] was created,’ enabled us to not only hold the pencil in the same way or make marks of the same intensity but to embody the artists’ gestures. The subtly and lightness of the Georgio Morandi drawing or the persistent pressure in Barriball’s work could be felt, rather than thought, through this process, as physical sensation.
To suppress personal mark-making styles and instead to inhabit the practice of another artist required conscious physical and mental effort, implying that our embedded drawing gestures can be habitual rather than meaningful. It offered possibilities for us to rethink our ways of drawing through unlearning and relearning technique, gesture and marks through a dialogue with the work of other artists. To lose oneself and our gestural habits and develop new ways of working that could be more useful and more truthful.
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The physical qualities of the pencil itself, its point, its ability to only make a relatively narrow mark make its use slow. To build up tone to the intensity of Jasper Johns or Anna Barriball drawing takes time to apply, layer upon layer. To use pencil with the restraint of Morandi or work at the minute scale of Samuel Palmer is equally time consuming. The point of a pencil can barely be used approximately, it commands a precision. The drawings took longer because there seemed to be nowhere to hide behind gesture.
Subtleties in our own drawings became more noticeable, the slowing of our own production attuned us to the ability to look more slowly and carefully at the artists’ works, which in turn led to further sensitivity in our own work. Work began to answer John Ruskin’s recurring appeal in 'The Elements of Drawing', for drawing to be approached ‘delicately.’ By limiting the medium studied and cross-referencing the work of artists from different eras, the work assumes a timeless quality, a dialogue that spans time, a lineage that we are part of - the catalyst for which was the seam of graphite discovered in Seathwaite in the sixteenth century.