Drawing : Graphite

After trying to get you all excited about paper perhaps a post about one of the materials we make marks and surfaces with is needed to redress the balance.

Because I have already touched upon charcoal and how to make it, I shall focus on its near cousin, graphite. Usually found in the form of the humble pencil, it is in fact crystallized carbon. It can be mined or made as an industrial product and you can get it in solid lumps, sticks, powder or liquid forms. I’m sure most of you will already have graphite sticks, if not the college shop usually stocks them and Richard Baker usually has a supply of graphite powder.

I first came across graphite as a liquid medium in the work of Jasper Johns. Graphite wash allowed him to create varying tones and to play with figure and ground issues; his brushstrokes sometimes defining numerals and sometimes creating surface gestural movement, sometimes clarifying the figure, sometimes exciting the ground. Graphite dust spreads around the edges of his drawings, making you aware of how they were made. You can use alcohol or methylated spirits as mediums to carry graphite and they dry very quickly, as graphite wash dries it turns back to dust and the borders of the drawing show traces of his fingers catching bits of this dust as he works the image up, his artist's handprint left in the margins. At the time I was particularly interested in the fact that you could hold an image between two states. One being the mark itself and the energy of its making, the other being the ability of marks to carry an image. Johns seemed to have found a way to make images that oscillated between the two.
If you are going to make a graphite wash you do need to think about solvents. There are two possibilities, one to use alcohol see the other is to use a painting medium mixed with pure turpentine.

Jasper Johns 'Numbers'

Johns has used graphite in several ways, another way of working graphite powder is as an oil medium. If you make an image using oil with no pigment in it, such as baby oil, and then sprinkle it with graphite or charcoal, the oil will stick and fix the powder. In his drawing ‘Study for Skin’ Johns covered his face with baby oil before imprinting it onto paper and then rubbed graphite across the surface to pick out the traces of oil. You can of course ‘paint’ with oil and then dust charcoal onto the surface, once again the oil will fix the graphite into place.

Jasper Johns 'Skin'

As Ruth Fine states, “Johns is consciously searching to discover every possible nuance of which a medium is capable.”  (1990, p. 53)

More recently the Indianapolis Museum of Art hosted an exhibition ‘Graphite’ which focused on artists using graphite as a medium; what was interesting about this show was that because it was an investigation into the medium as a whole, the work although drawing centred also included 3D pieces. It demonstrated that as you start to get really involved with material investigation what might initially be read as a drawing medium, quickly becomes simply a physical material and therefore becomes sculpture. Once again we start to work in the frayed edges between disciplines, an area within which I always believe the most interesting work is often done.

If you have an IPad you can get a downloadable catalogue here.

Contemporary artists are using graphite in a variety of ways, these are just a few.

Dan Shaw-Town, Michaela Fruhwirth and Anna Barriball use graphite’s ability to be built up to a very polished solid surface. If you take a thick B4 to B6 grade graphite stick you can work it into a sheet of tough paper by pushing it up and down with a fair degree of weight behind your arm. Do this over and over again and eventually you can get a metal like sheen. see earlier post on Anna Barriball here
Dan Shaw-Town’s work occupies a space somewhere between drawing and sculpture, in particular when he begins folding his heavily worked graphite surfaces and laying them on the floor.

Dan Shaw Town

Michaela Fruhwirth’s drawings are made from particular locations. She creates a membrane to trap found surfaces. Her drawings, sit between 'abstraction' and 'trace', as she builds images from the rubbings she makes. See detail

Michaela Fruhwirth

Molly Springfield uses graphite to create delicate almost trompe-l'œil images often of printed ephemera. She will make photocopies of books and other printed matter and the use graphite to copy the copy. The degrading of the images being an essential aspect of the concepts she is using. For those of you interested in mimesis she is an interesting artist to follow.

Molly Springfield

Roland Flexner makes imaginary landscapes, sometimes using graphite washes and at other times using ink wash. He was inspired by these two passages below from Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting.

“By looking attentively at old and smeared walls, or stones and veined marble of various colours, you may fancy that you see in them several compositions, landscapes, battles, figures in quick motion, strange countenances, and dresses, with an infinity of other objects. By these confused lines the inventive genius is excited to new exertions”. (Chapter CLXIII)

“By throwing a sponge impregnated with various colours against a wall, it leaves some spots upon it, which may appear like a landscape. It is true also, that a variety of compositions may be seen in such spots, according to the disposition of mind with which they are considered; such as heads of men, various animals, battles, rocky scenes, seas, clouds, woods, and the like. It may be compared to the sound of bells, which may seem to say whatever we choose to imagine”. (Chapter CCCXLIX)

Flexner’s other main source of ideas was the book Aberrations: An Essay on the Legend of Forms by Jurgis Baltrušaitis. It’s hard to find now but is an excellent source of ideas of you are interested in nature and its deformations.

Roland Flexner

T.R. Ericsson’s work relies on using graphite in a similar way to screenprint ink. This video clip will explain. Graphite used in this way creates a very beautiful surface it glistens and as it reflects the light you become more aware of the fact it is still a powder. Of course you can also work back into these images with rubbers and more graphite. For those of you that want to combine photographic images with mark making I really recommend this process. (Don’t forget to fix the images when finished, a process that needs very careful attention if you are not to disturb the image’s surface)

Joyce Hinterding makes drawings by building a system that picks up signals and energy emitted from the surrounding area. Her graphite ‘Field and Loops’ Drawings operate as sound-scapes or aural landscapes. Those of you interested in drawing machines could learn a lot from her use of sound technology and the relationship between sound and vibration pattern.

Joyce Hinterding

Kim Jones developed a performance artist persona called Mudman this was both artistic persona and a living construction. Part walking sculpture, part shaman, part urban cult figure, Jones has more recently been working on his War Drawings which are highly detailed graphite pencil drawings in which x-men and dot-men endlessly struggle to engage and disengage. This video of him talking about his work is a good introduction.

Kim Jones

Robert Longo the Freud drawings

Longo’s graphite and charcoal drawings done from Engelman’s photographic record of Freud’s office operate almost as theatre sets constructed with the props of a significant cultural history. Longo adds to a historical consciousness by making work that is very large, as well as being rendered with a high degree of surface crafting.

Robert Longo: Freud Drawing

Robert Longo: Freud Drawing

Adam McEwen’s work includes machined graphite sculptures. As well as a variety of other conceptual practices he has engaged with high end manufacturing processes, the ability of graphite to be cut and shaped in large blocks, being essential to the production of his work. His sculptures are identical reproductions down to the smallest details and in the exact scale. McEwen’s “ATM Cash Machine” is modelled after the ones seen on any street corner or in corner shops in New York. The work embodying the ultimate transaction where immaterial data is exchanged for money.

Adam McEwen

“The only difference between the ready-mades and McEwen’s works is the material: the object’s form is translated into a vector-based image then extracted from a block of graphite. Thus, these standardized products become non-functioning objects and operate purely on a sensorial and symbolic level. They have been silenced, like the limits of representation in the socio-economic system, which has suddenly frozen in place. McEwen enjoys telling an anecdote about the properties of graphite — a basic material in drawing which the he applies to sculpture. This allotropic mineral made from carbon allows us to cultivate several paradoxes. It is at once a waste product (an object that is literally carbonized) and also part of the same chemical class as the precious resource, the diamond.
Here, the value of the material loses all importance because the economy itself has been reduced to nothing — symbolically the objects no longer circulate and their distilled and static states call into question the entire system of exchange value”.

Caroline Soyez-Petithomme

Adam McEwen

Of course graphite can be used in an infinite number of ways, back in the 4th millennium B.C., during the Neolithic period the Mariţa culture used graphite to decorate pottery and in Borrowdale Cumbria they used to use it to mark sheep. Borrowdale graphite was also used to line moulds for cannonballs, resulting in rounder, smoother balls that could be fired farther. So both graphite and cartridge paper had military applications. This link between art and war is an old one. The diagram below examines the evolution of the word art. Arthron being at the root stem of both to make and to arm.

Rt or sometimes Rta, is the dynamic process by which the whole cosmos continues to be created. I first came across it in the writings of Robert Persig, he introduces the idea in 'Lila: an inquiry into morals'. In his 'Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance' I found an empathetic writer who seemed to really understand the importance of making things by hand. 'The physical order of the universe is also the moral order. Rta is both'. (Persig,1992, p444)

Persig, R (1992) 'Lila: an inquiry into morals' London: Corgi

Drawing

Tuesday 4 November 2014

Graphite

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