The Ballpoint Pen

Joan Salo: Drawing on canvas using coloured ballpoint pens

It's been a while since I put up a post about a particular drawing material and one of the most common, one which is used by many of us on a daily basis as a go to implement; is the biro or ballpoint pen. This is a type of pen that as a young artist I was warned off using,  I was told it had no expressive power because its line was not variable. However; as you become more familiar with it, you realise it has its own unique set of attributes and these can be pushed to their limits.

Like most materials used within art practice it can be examined in two ways. First of all as a material with particular qualities, qualities that can be investigated within a non figurative framework, and the structuring of the investigation can be very process led.  In the case of Ill Lee's work (below), there is a very simple core idea, however because the drawings are worked on for hours at a time, eventually the energy masses created vibrate with a refined almost 'dancing' energy. This has a lot to do with the speed with which the lines are created.  Each individual line has a smooth curvature, one that reflects that these lines are made quickly with purpose and an authority. This is not a shaky, fragile line, and because of this the images vibrate with a confident energy. The three dark shapes in the drawing below are composed of thousands of lines worked one on top of each other, a process that suggests that the images gradually arriving are a result of energy turning into mass.  

Ill Lee

Compare Ill Lee's work with Joan Salo's. 

Joan Salo

Salo's work uses a ballpoint pen together with a ruler to develop systematic explorations of vertical lines. The darker elements being where lines overlap in their making. 

The other way to look at the use of ballpoint pens is to examine their expressive qualities, and to explore what happens when familiar visual imagery is rendered by them. In the rendering of forms, all materials have what you could call expressive specificity.  The soft broken lines of charcoal being totally different to the sharp precision of the ballpoint line. The fact that ballpoints come ready loaded with coloured ink means that a particular colour range not only becomes available, most often blues, blacks, greens and reds, but that these colours become one of the defining properties of biro drawing. 

Of course the key expressive factor is the fact that biros produce continuous flowing lines; you don't have to keep refreshing the ink by dipping this drawing implement into a reservoir, the tip being composed of a smoothly rolling ball, which can travel in any direction, thus eliminating the dip-in pen stroke's thickness difference. The fact that the line is very thin and sharp edged, coupled with the fact that the ink dries almost as soon as it is applied to the paper surface, means that you can make very detailed drawings that can reach a high level of 'finish'. 

Gary Lawrence: Homage To Anonymous: Ballpoint pen (6ft by 4ft)

The drawing above by Gary Lawrence won the Jerwood Drawing competition a few years ago, only a ballpoint pen could have given the artist the facility to render such an amount of crisp detail over such a large surface area.  Compare his work with that of Renato Orara, who makes highly detailed drawings of individual objects that float isolated in white space. 

Renato Orara

Andrei Molodkin began using ballpoint pens to draw when he was in the Russian army; soldiers were issued two ballpoint pens, so that they could write letters home to their loved ones. He now works with ballpoints on a huge scale and often draws directly onto canvas. 

Andrei Molodkin

Although beginning to use ballpoints when in the army, Molodkin associates the use of ballpoints with prison, as no other writing implements are allowed. 

Jacques Floret states that "the four colour ballpoint pen has for a number of years, been my tool of choice. I use the four colour ballpoint pen so that I don't have to choose my colours." His image of what I take to be an elastic band powered motorboat that someone has made out of the odds and sods of an old matchbox, a few matches and a twisted elastic band, makes me think about what it means to be inventive. Invention is often about encounters. In this case an encounter with an old cork, the box of matches, and a rubber band, meets a man with four biros. Yet another material idea emerges. Humans pride themselves on their ability to be inventive, and yet Floret reveals a paradox, he uses the same four biros over and over again because that means he doesn't have to choose his colours, which perhaps reflects the fact that human choice to do things isn't all what it's cracked up to be, and that the little boat is as much about the matches, matchbox, elastic and cork as it is about a human being or a biro. The important issue is that as they encounter each other, something else emerges, something that is a product of all of them, not just the animal that prides itself on its ability to think. 

Jacques Floret

Donna Coleman is a Leeds based artist that often uses ballpoint pens. Working in that gap between figuration and abstraction, her disembodied heads float in a haze of biro lines. A cloud of vibrating lines will come slowly into focus as a human and then as you stare at it, it may dissolve back into a swirl of marks. Sometimes she will leave gaps, returning attention back to the paper surface revealing all as an illusion. Donna's heads sit in that space of uncertainty that perhaps so many of us live in, reminding us that all is illusion and that all we really consist of is a vibratory pattern, sometimes perceived by others and at other times invisible to all. 

Donna Coleman: Social Media Immersion

Donna Coleman: Apathy

Part of a material's communication range is associated with its history and common uses. The 'biro' is the world's most used writing implement, and was as most people know invented by László Bíró. Its cheapness and ready availability mark it out as a medium for 'everyone', therefore it is a good material to use, especially if you want to avoid the 'art' associations of certain materials such as charcoal or graphite. The tool of a billion doodles, the biro has a rich sub-text and as a material it is well worthwhile investigating. In particular if you go back to Biró's initial research, the idea of working with very stiff ink and a metal rolling ball is fascinating, and could be opened out into performance, sculpture and installation work, as well as of course new drawings. 

Some artists using ballpoint pens sit in that gap between fine art and commercial art. For instance, the use of a biro to make his work allows Lennie Mace to move between tattoo design, cartoons and surrealist inspired imagery, without a worry over what particular area he should be operating out of. He just does what he does. 

Lenny Mace

There is a book now available that showcases some of the best work of this sort: The Art of the Ballpoint by Matt Rota.

See also http://www.artnews.com/2014/01/08/great-art-made-with-ballpoint-pens/

Coda

Several years after putting up this post I was asked to work with Donna Colemen on a small book about her work. This artists' book is still available here.

Link to other posts on drawing materials:

Pen and ink
Graphite
Charcoal
Oak Gall ink
Alternative materials
Pencils and erasers
The pencil and sustainability
Why does ink stick to paper
Paper and cardboard