Additional specifications and related considerations

¶ … Pencil:" an Artist's View of an Implement

The pencil is not beautiful. Its pointed, dark grey, graphite nib is as ugly and drab as the lead-tipped pencils of my parent's childhood. It leaves a long, steely trail across the white, heavy-woven page. What will the slashing action of the pencil bring to life? A horse? A mountain? A woman's face? My fingers clasp the wood. Old-fashioned wood. Yellow and thin. Some people my age hardly know how to hold a pencil, even though their fingers dance across a computer's keys with ease. For them, gripping a pencil is like shaking hands with a stranger. They associate pencils with scantron tests that require a No.2 nib or writing thank-you notes to elderly relatives. For me, feeling the pencil is freedom: freedom from technology and linear thought as I draw, engaging in the primal pleasure of all -- making something from nothing.

The pencil can make the images in my mind come to life, although only imperfectly. As a child, I remember trying to copy a "Calvin and Hobbes" cartoon and being frustrated how the lines that looked so simple on the page looked distorted in my rendition. Now I am a better artist, but some things still frustrate me -- I see a landscape in my mind but something goes wrong in the connection between my brain, hand and pencil. The image on the page of my artist's notebook looks fine, but in my mind the image was better than fine. And I cannot blame the pencil for my failure, even though it was the instrument that produced that failure.

With the right control, the images from an artist's pencil can seduce, charm, and repel. I have become familiar with many pencils -- soft No. 1s, medium No.2s, and hard No.3s, as well as colored pencils. All types of pencils produce different lines, shadings, and different qualities of motion and stillness. A duller or shaper standard pencil can be used to create chiaroscuro in a nighttime setting or more sharply-detailed character in a face, provided that the artist knows how to use the implement correctly. An artist must be taught, by another artist -- or through trial and error, the artist can teach him or herself.

But sometimes the pencil teaches me. I will be doodling, and suddenly find myself amazed at the strange, symmetrical beauty of the shapes of the squares, triangles, and hexagons furling out from the nib. The presence of the pencil has released something from my unconscious mind. I will be staring at a line, attempting to draw my other hand or even just write my name and the strange turn and twist of the lines will urge me on to newer, more fruitful creative heights. A tropical flower, a dog jumping rope, or an abstract image will suddenly come, generated by the presence of the pencil and the inspiration of the lines it makes, not my thinking mind at all.

Richard Selzer has said that a surgeon is like a poet: but an artist is like a surgeon. After creating an image, bringing it to life, the artist must go back and edit out what does not work: ruthlessly, I must erase, re-do, reshape, and re-shade.