I may have come late to painting, but I’ve drawn all my life. It’s the best feeling to be making marks. Of course drawing can be many things. Meticulously rendered or scribbled, made with pencils, waxy crayons, biros, fountain pens and mapping pens with scratchy, spluttering steel nibs. Stylographs. (A pen with a hollow needle like a hypodermic through which ink passes from a reservoir.) Chinese pens whittled from bamboo and calligraphic brushes from China for fat-bellied strokes of ink tapering to whippy flourishes. Sticks of smudgy charcoal and pigment-rich Conté pencil… a favourite of mine. Chalk. Pastels dry and crumbly that need fixing with aerosol or the marks fall off the paper, and the greasy variety with pigment held in hardened oil. Quills dipped in ink, but twigs dipped in ink will do and I have some much loved ones. Silverpoint pencils that make ravishing marks by depositing tiny amounts of metal onto the paper, the stuff of alchemy. (See HERE for more information on this most delicate of drawing tools.) Candy-coloured barley-twist blown-glass pens from Bohemia with ribbed points that hold the ink. Plain sticks with which to draw in sand or earth, etching needles through wax, penknives sliced through tree bark, scorch marks onto paper. Bradawls for making sgraffito lines through wet paint. Threads worked on textile. (The Bayeux tapestry is in effect a drawing made with coloured threads.) The man-made mark is endless in variety. Drawings can be vigourously worked with dense shading and tone or delicately conjured out of thin, fugitive lines.
Here are some pencil drawings from my archive. No dates or titles. Just working drawings, the kind I make as preparatory studies. No rubbing out. New marks made on top of old. All the lines showing, everything evolving and alive. This is to be an occasional series, so more later. (I apologise that these haven’t been posted at a higher definition.)
I’m with Lucy: Before I even got to the drawings, I already felt sated and spent by your descriptions. Beautifully offered, Clive. What a delight to see passion in the work that spills over to an intimate relationship with the tools.
Your sensuous descriptions of techniques and materials quite makes the mouth water!
I think I got carried away once I’d started with the sheer variety of mark-making implements. My list got longer and more poetic too. I often get swept up in words, to the point where I’m frequently cautioned by Peter, a talented editor, to pare back rather than add. The writing is perhaps a tad too flowery but thank you Lucy and Jason for your enthusiasm. I should point out there’s nothing on that list I haven’t got, more often than not in multiples. I collect pens and dipping nibs whenever I see them. (I fear one day there will be no more manufacturers of dipping nibs… in fact they may already be extinct… and so I buy up old stocks wherever I find them. When I found exactly the right kind of Conté pencil, I sent off to Germany for a case of them, just so that I’d never have to look again!
My friend Anita Mills from N. Carolina made a beautiful thick-as my-thumb propelling pencil for me, turning the most comfortable hardwood barrel that the oil in my palm has darkened to a deep, polished burgundy/black. She sent ‘leads’ too, thick and glorious to draw with. The pencil goes everywhere with me. But when I told Anita that I’d had difficulty finding replacement leads for it in the U.K., another package arrived from the States, this time with enough leads in all varieties and colours that I think I’ll wear out before the pencil will need any more replacements. Anita and I are as one one on this matter of keeping the store well stocked. As a potter she has enough materials on hand to to sink a battleship. “After all…” she says, “… you never know when you’re going to be able to find that stuff again, so buy all you’ll need while you can!” I’m of a like mind. And after I’m dead, someone can have a hell of a studio clearance sale here!