April's class on art media at the LeMoyne Gallery is perfect for me: an overview of many ways to (pardon the art talk ) "make marks." Wednesday was pencils, plain black graphite sticks sheathed in wood. I have a long and intimate relationship with pencils; as I tend to do with everything I love, I have held my pencils too tight. The middle finger on my right hand is misshapen because I gripped so hard as a child. I still feel most myself when I'm carrying a pencil. All these years, for me a pencil has been to write. Now it is also to draw.
I thought drawing was making lines -- defining the perimeter of things. April said you can also do this with dots and/ or dashes. If you clump them tight you make dark space. You can also crosshatch, which is slanting lines, first one way and then the other. Since Wednesday I've been looking differently at art online. I wasn't surprised to discover that my favorite artist, Agnes Martin, really used her pencil. So that's what graphite meant, describing her gray squares that I love so much. And then there's Drawings from the Louvre, coming Sept. 23 to the Morgan Library. Wow! Those artists are like God, giving life with just a humble pencil. . . Well, OK, God didn't even need a pencil.
Wikipedia told me that pencils are graphite, not lead. We just say lead pencil because it looks like lead. HB is the European designation for our number 2 pencil. H means hard and B is soft, or black. You can see a chart here. When the number gets bigger, the graphite is harder or blacker, but not both, going all the way to 9 for each, with HB in the middle. And of course Cedar Key, Florida, was a world producer of pencil cedar until the town was destroyed by hurricane in 1896.
We are supposed to practice drawing. But first I sewed a pencil carrier because my pencils kept banging against each other in the bag. And, of course, I need to keep one out -- just to hold.
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