The Pencil: Sustainability

A 'Yes You Can' set of uplifting quotes on pencils, made from incense-cedar and lots of other things

I thought I'd revisit some of my earlier posts on artists' materials and think about them from a sustainability point of view. A while ago I posted on graphite, it's most common drawing use is in the form of pencil leads, so I shall begin there. 

Pencils, if they have attachments on the end are made from zinc and copper, as well as the lead's clay and graphite mix, and of course there is that eraser on the end which in the case of the Pink Pearl includes added pumice. The wood is though the material that appears to be the most obvious sustainability issue. My first question is what sort of wood is it? In the USA pencils are often made from incense-cedar. A reddish-brown wood with a fine, straight grain. I checked and this is not listed in the CITES appendices and is reported by the IUCN as being a species of least concern. Poplar (Populus tremula), and juniper (Juniperus excelsa) are also used extensively as wood for pencils. Poplar is not listed in the CITES Appendices but Juniper has been declining throughout the UK in range and abundance. It is not known exactly why it is declining, but it appears that the plants are unable to regenerate successfully.

Incense-cedar

IUCN: the International Union for Conservation of Nature is the global authority on the status of the natural world and the measures needed to safeguard it.

CITES: the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species, has three different levels of protection for species, known as Appendices.

Appendix I – This appendix represents species that are in the most danger and are considered to be threatened with extinction, and are consequently the most restricted in international trade.

Appendix II – This appendix contains species that are at risk in the wild, but not necessarily threatened with extinction. Species in this appendix are closely regulated, but are typically not as restricted as Appendix I.

Appendix III – This appendix contains species that a certain country (called a “party” within CITES), has voluntarily requested to be regulated in order to help preserve the species in question. Appendix III species regulation is only applicable for the specific party that has requested its inclusion, and is therefore much less restrictive than Appendix I or II.

As I started to research woods, I found this very interesting downloadable resource. It's a wood handbook that looks at wood from the point of view of what can you do with it. As I began to read through what is undoubtedly a fascinating document, I became more and more aware how we as a species really think of other species. The handout deals with how to cut, shape, fix, use and get the most out of each wood. It regards wood as being unique, but only in the sense of what we can do with it. No effort at all is put into thinking about the eco-relationship these wonderful things might have with the world around them and how they have evolved into the various niches that they have grown to fit, like the image above of incense cedar, each tree is isolated, its properties itemised and its use value assessed. The only times other issues are mentioned are when a particular tree resource seems to have been overused, so there are now no naturally grown stocks of it left, and the handbook usually then suggests that another type of wood is similar, so we should now use that. 

So the trees that the wood comes from unless it comes from a declining juniper stock, are not according to my research endangered. However, the trucks used to transport the wood pollute the air by releasing carbon monoxide and burning hydrocarbons. Typically large stands of incense-cedar are grown far away from cities and manufacturing centres, so there will be a lot of transportation and associated pollution involved.  
The wood once it gets to the factory is treated with chemicals to remove insect infestations, these chemicals often find their way into the surrounding environment. The tree trunks are then cut into blocks that are then cut into slats. Eight shallow grooves are then sawed lengthwise into each slat. The energy used to drive the machines that do this work is of course going to come from electrical power, that is itself produced by often non sustainable coal or oil burning processes. 

Stages in pencil manufacture

Before the slats can be filled with graphite and clay these substances are mixed together in a large rotating drum. Rocks inside the drum crush the graphite and clay into a fine powder and water is then added, the mixture then has to thoroughly soak for up to three days. The mixture is than taken to another machine to squeeze all the water out leaving behind a grey sludge, which then has to dry out over four days. After drying, the pencil leads are put into an oven heated to 1,800 degrees F. 

The shallow grooves in the slats are filled with the graphite clay mix and then another grooved slat is glued down on top of the first one. 

Graphite and clay both need to be mined. I have looked at some of the problems that come from graphite mining and they can be severe. At night in areas around graphite mines, "The air sparkles" reported a Chinese farmer worried about his health and that of his crops. A lustrous grey dust settles over his fields, crops are stunted, food is gritty and the local water is becoming undrinkable. Since graphite mining has developed in his area, many of the local trees have died. Graphite is mainly used for lithium batteries now and pencil leads are only a small concern. I was not surprised at how easily a fine dust could spread out and pollute an area and although I have yet to find details of the working conditions of those people actually involved with mining graphite for pencils, I would suspect they are poor and because fine particles of dust are so bad for the lungs, I would also suspect their life expectancy is pretty short. 

Yunshan graphite mine

Once dry the joined slats are machined in order to shape the individual pencils. Fast revolving steel blades trim the wood into round or hexagonal shapes, one side at a time. The pencils then have to be paint coated, printed with the company name and important technical details. Once the pencil has been painted, a metal band is wrapped tightly around one end of the pencil so that an eraser can be fitted.  

I found this in the US patents list:

UNITED STATES PATENT Office

EBERHARD FABER, OF WEST NEW BRIGHTON, NEW YORK. 

MEANS FOR ATTACHING RUBBER TIPS TO PENCILS. 

SPECIFICATION forming part of Letters Patent No. 457,579, dated August 11, 1891, 

Application filed March 26, 1891. Serial No. 386,422. (No model.) L 

To all whom, it may concern: 

Be it known that I, EBERHARD FABER, a citizen of the United States, residing at West New Brighton, in the county of Richmond and State of New York, have invented an Improvement in Means for Attaching Rubber Tips to Pencils, of which the following is a specification. 

Lead-pencils have been provided with india-rubber erasers or tips at one end attached by bands or cylinders of metal or other material, and very frequently the cylinder that is connected to the pencil has been provided with a screw-thread in the sheet metal of the cylinder for screwing the rubber into or out of the holder. In practice it has been found that the rubber is liable to Work loose within the metallic tube or holder and fall out, especially when such rubber projects to a distance beyond the end of the metal tube. Paper tubes or holders have been made use of at the end of the pencil to connect the rubber to the same; but such paper tubes are liable to become injured and they are not easily kept clean and the paper detracts from the appearance of the pencil. 

In the drawings, Figure l is an elevation of my improved pencil, and Fig. 2 a section, both being of magnified size. 

In my present improvementsI make use of a narrow metal band A in order to lessen the expense and at the same time to maintain the proper appearance of the pencil, and I insert the rubber plug or eraser B into this band A. If these parts only were made use of, the rub her would be liable to separate from the band and the band to separate from the pencil. To avoid these two difficulties I roughen the metal band A on its exterior surface by pressing into the metal band peripheral grooves or similar indentations, and I apply glue at D between the inner end of the plug and the end of the pencil C in order that such glue may cause the rubber to adhere directly to the pencil and that the glue may pass into the grooves or roughening of the metal band, and thereby connect the rubber and the band and the band and the pencil, because such glue spreads into the grooves and by setting retains the band in position, although such glue may not adhere to the metal itself. Iinsure a firm hold of the pencil to the metal band and the rubber by this simple but efficient device. 

I claim as my invention The combination, with the rubber tip or eraser and the pencil, of a narrow metallic band surrounding the junction of the two and having peripheral grooves or indenta' tions, there being glue or similar adhesive material between the rubber and the pencil end, which also passes into the grooves or rouehening of the metallic band for connecting the parts together, substantially as set forth. 

Signed by me this 20th day of March,l89l. 

EBERHARD FABER.

I don't think the patent was ever granted but I found the issue of ownership interesting. Someone wanted to own this just slightly different way of putting an eraser onto the end of a pencil. Just as in the wood handbook, the language used suggests the staking of a claim over things. I'm reminded of the land claims that the North American Indian tribes fell foul of.  Some animals mark the temporary use of territory, they lay down scent trails or scratch claw marks into trees but only humans legally lay claim to ownership of the earth, its plants and other humans' thoughts and ideas. 

The pencils are sharpened and then packaged. Pencils come in variety of packaging and many of them come in plastic bubble packs; pencils are no different from so many products in being wrapped in totally unsustainable, non biodegradable, petrochemical eco-disaster threatening plastic. I doubt I need to begin looking at any other art materials, the point should have been made. But remember it doesn't end there, what if you make a pencil drawing that is then sold to a famous gallery that now begins to exert great efforts in preserving this drawing, by framing it under glass, keeping it at a constant temperature under controlled lighting. This drawing may be shipped around the world to other galleries, that also spend energy on ensuring its safety and displaying it in such a way that its status is enhanced. 
So why am I pushing this sustainability issue? I think it's because the older I get the more I see that everything is about relationships and how things are connected. Drawing is one area of art that escaped being seen as a finished product. It was historically seen as a process on the way towards something. You used drawing to plan, to work out what you were going to do, or to collect information such as how things looked, so that you could make paintings or sculptures from the information gathered. This meant that for many years drawing was little valued and paintings and sculptures were seen as the high points of art practice. However the more I think about how we are brought up to consume, the more I realise that consumerism teaches us to desire things and these things are usually objects separated from any sort of communal values other than the basic ones of I've got more and better things than you have.  When objects are separated from their context, we can be sold them as answers to our desires and we can buy them without any concerns as to where they have come from and what went on in their production. So part of looking at the details behind the production of things is to try and get beyond their 'isolated object' status and to see things as part of a web of connections. If I am that bit more aware of where a pencil comes from and how its manufacture might impact on other things, perhaps it might deepen my understanding of where other things come from and how they are deeply inter-connected into the web of life. I realise I make compromises, and sometimes I use materials that I haven't thought enough about myself. But I do try to think through how everything is interconnected, how all the things I have done in my own life are threaded together. How what used to be called the wyrd can still be seen as a useful metaphor for life. These are small steps and when you look at the problems of global warming facing us all, it can appear to be so daunting that you just want to walk away and forget it all. But in reality at a microscopic scale we are all just vibrating patterns, patterns that seem to connect to each other in the most surprising ways. An acceptance to this and an awareness that it is desire that causes us unhappiness, might be a good first step to take, and then as we move on perhaps the work we do might have some wider relevance than just to the world of art. 

One image still haunts me, the fact that at night in areas around graphite mines, "The air sparkles". The graphite dust settles over the ground and at night if the moon is shining very clearly the landscape will twinkle and softly glow, as the hexagonal structure of graphite reflects the moonlight, the tiny graphite particles, diamond like, glint in the dark, a presage of something to come, of a future not far away, or perhaps a future already here. It will be from the soil of images like these, that I suspect art will arise, and it will hopefully be art worthy of the subject. 

If you now go back to the original post on graphite, one of the links I put in it was to the work of T. R. Ericsson, not so much because of the power of his images, but to highlight the technique he was using, that of pushing powdered graphite through the mesh of a photo-silkscreen. I would like to imagine a new work using the same process, but this time the photograph is of a snow twinkling landscape, one that we sometimes receive as a card near Xmas time, one that has all the sentimental associations of a snow covered rural countryside. Then to reverse the image, to make the negative into a very large silkscreen and to print off the image using Ericsson's graphite print method.  You could then do the same thing with a photograph of the area that surrounds a real graphite mine. This could be the starting point for a new body of work. 

The hidden tales of graphite mines

See also: 

Sustainability part one

The 12 principles of permaculture as a manifesto for art practice

Pencils and erasers 

Charcoal and sustainability 

The drawings of Nancy Rubins at the Gagosian

Nancy Rubins: Graphite on paper

There is an exhibition of Nancy Rubins’ work at the Gagosian gallery in Britannia Street, London at the moment. It’s on until April the 14^th, so if you are travelling down to London by train go and see it, as Britannia Street is very close to Kings Cross station.

Although this is an exhibition of both her sculpture and drawings, I was particularly interested in the two very large drawings Rubins had on exhibition (Above). These drawings were essentially about the illusion of weight. I have seen some very good Richard Serra exhibitions in the same gallery and Rubins’ drawings reminded me of Serra’s interest in iron and how heavy it can be, however these particular drawings were I thought, much more to do with the old tradition of trompe d’oeil. Rubins works in graphite on paper, and like Anna Barriball builds up dense textures by pushing graphite into the paper surface. However there is a big difference in how she is developing this surface. 

Detail

Rubins tears and re-joins her paper, she has also attached tape and pulled it back off so that areas of rough texture can be developed. I suspect she sands the paper surface as well. As you scan the drawings you can see subtle changes in the way light reflects off differences in texture, as the gallery lights pick up the various changes in direction her hands must have taken as she pushed the graphite across the surface. There have been many hours spent building up a surface of this intensity, these drawings in many ways being a document to Rubins’ labours. 

Detail

The paper itself is a thick, heavy weight and a not hot pressed one; a hand made paper that collects graphite powder in the pocks and holes in its surface, thus preventing the sheen that Barriball gets when she rubs her graphite into a paper surface. The density of the material Rubins ends up with means that these sheets of paper look like lead and on first glance could be mistaken for wall mounted sculptures. On second glance you can see that these ‘sculptures’ are held onto the walls simply by using metal headed push pins. 

Detail

If you bend down and look behind the areas that bend away from the wall you can see that this work is a product of the material properties of paper, the untreated backs of the paper sheets revealing the true nature of the work.

Paper can be folded, creased, torn, ripped, bent into curves, pinned to walls, it can be made to crack as it is bent or folded, and is easily overlapped and layered. Rubins takes full advantage of the fact that this heavy looking material is in fact paper light and she is obviously enjoying the freedom of compositional variation that these building methods give her.

Finally we are left with the associations these ‘leaden’ looking surfaces suggest. From the giving of monumentality to the simple graphite pencil mark, via thoughts about lead sheeting, the look of Anslem Keifers’ books and aeroplanes, via the look of broken armour, to memories of 1950s and 60s lead lined atomic shelters. There is though also something about drapery as well, folded and draped materials having a long history of Classical associations in Western history of art. Perhaps above all I was interested in Rubins’ drawings because they were just graphite on paper, something that she would have probably done when she made her very first drawings as a child, and what she does is show us what the potential is when you just push an activity to its logical conclusion. 

See also these earlier posts.

Graphite

Theimprint and the trace (This post also introduces Anna Barriball’s graphite work)

Pencils and Erasers

This is another of my occasional posts whereby I look at what goes on when you actually make a drawing. In this case I shall ramble around a few ideas coming from that old and well-loved technique ‘pencil on paper’ and the indispensable eraser. 

I asked myself a very basic question about why marks stick on surfaces in an earlier post about ink on paper, so thought it a good idea to begin this post with the same question. In this case the sticking of graphite to paper. Perfect graphite consists of sheets of atom-thick carbon atoms whose intermolecular forces (specifically instantaneous induced dipoles) cause them to stick together, and the graphite in your pencil is made of many layers. However, the intermolecular forces between the graphite sheets and the paper are greater than the intermolecular forces between the graphite sheets, so when rubbed together, the graphite sticks to the page and shears off of your lead, leaving graphite on the page and a dull tip on your pencil.

The process is not due to a chemical reaction it is because of a physical process called physiosorption. Physiosorption creates a bond between two surfaces primarily through the effect of van der Waals forces, which are electrostatic as opposed to chemical. What's happening is that graphite (a naturally-occurring form of crystalline carbon) has a structure with lots of layers. These layers are only weakly bonded (if compared to a covalent or ionic bond) to each other by van der Waals forces, allowing them to shear easily away onto the paper when you use your pencil, which is why we use graphite in pencils in the first place. (Most solids won't rub off onto a surface so easily, see Mohs scale of mineral hardness, graphite is only between 1 and 2 on that scale). So after being sheared off the pencil tip, the graphite planes (referred to individually as graphene planes) will bond with the paper using the same van der Waals forces.  (It's the van der Waals attraction between surfaces and the foot-hairs of geckos that gives them the ability to climb up vertical walls) The process works so well that enough graphite is deposited in a line drawn by a pencil, that it can conduct electricity.  

Paper is also full of little holes, divots and fibers that get filled with graphite particles. Therefore another area that needs exploring when it comes to why marks adhere to the paper surface is the nature of paper itself, something that has again been touched on in earlier posts, but not yet on a microscopic level, I shall look at this at some point in the future.

Objects like pencils leave ‘skid marks’ on paper, the visible marks left by any solid which moves against another. Such marks are important evidence for any visual interpretation in relation to what happened when these contacts were made. For instance when car accidents are reconstructed, the size and shape of these marks can be used to determine vehicle speed and forces of acceleration or deceleration. They are a form of trace evidence. These types of marks are often encountered in criminal cases, so perhaps also think of bite marks or scratch marks. They represent a form of contact evidence produced in forensic terms according to Locard’s exchange principle. (Whereby the perpetrator of a crime will bring something into the crime scene and leave with something from it) or "Every contact leaves a trace".

I have looked at the idea of drawings as traces before, but in this case you can begin to think of a drawing as a form of ‘trace evidence’.

Trace evidence in police terms, is any type of material left at (or taken from) a crime scene, or the result of contact between two surfaces, such as shoes and a floor covering or soil, or fibers from where someone sat on an upholstered chair. So one way to read a drawing is for you to become more like Sherlock Holmes and to look at each physical mark and read it as indicative of a suspect action, as if the drawing was a crime scene.
If I was to have to wipe out the evidence, the normal tool in the case of a pencil drawing would be a rubber or eraser. If it was a crime scene of course the first question would be why have certain things been removed from the scene? But in this case I’m looking more at how.

An eraser works in several ways, one of which is by giving the graphite that has adhered to the paper something more attractive to stick to. The structure of the rubber material makes the graphite stick more strongly to it than to the paper. Because it has a stronger attraction to the graphite than the paper, the stronger bond will remove the graphite from the paper when you move the eraser.

However, simply washing with soap and water will also remove graphite from paper. Water and soap will interrupt the van der Waals bonding between the graphite planes. Again this could reflect the idea of clearing up a crime scene. So would you decide to wash marks out of a drawing rather than rub them out? How would this effect the final outcome?

Thinking of washing, we always used to keep a pumice stone in the bathroom which was used to get rid of hard to remove grime and pumice is also an important ingredient in erasers. Pumice, in the form of a particular volcanic ash from Italy was used mixed in with rubber to give erasers their abrasive quality, whereby they break down the surface of the paper in order to detach the graphite marks. Hence Faber's the Pink Pearl.

19th century pencil drawing of Pompeii

Volcanic ash can be thought of as a geological eraser, falling like snow, it obliterates the landscape below. Pompeii was lost under volcanic ash and as the ruins were uncovered they became a favourite place for travellers to visit and make drawings. There are thousands of 'tourists' drawings of these ruins and they became an integral part of the European Romantic tradition. Artists would follow 'the Grand Tour' and following on from the artists who made these sites visible, the elite of Northern Europe travelled to centres like Pompeii as necessary rites of passage. These romantic ruins invited spectators' reflections on transience, death, and decay. The romance of the ruin eventually became a key concept that lay at the core of certain artistic practices. Rauschenberg famously erased a De Kooning drawing, in effect erasing the idea of the genius artist, another romantic trope. 

Rauschenberg: erased De Kooning

Vija Celmins: Eraser, 1967 acrylic on balsa wood 6-5/8 x 20 x 3-1/8 inches

In 1966-67, Vija Celmins made four painted sculptures: three Pink Pearl erasers and one pencil, meticulously crafted of painted balsa wood and giganticised. The edges of the erasers are slightly worn, they have been used; but for what purpose? The construction of exact replicas used to be part of another set of art tropes, including 'realism' and in the 1960s objects taken from the everyday and remade larger were seen as part of the 'Pop Art' genre. I would however like to propose a conceptual piece, I construct a hypothetical drawing, whereby the Pink Pearl is used to erase a 'Grand tour' pencil drawing of the ruins of Pompeii. A final gesture to signal the end of Romanticism.

Edward Naime, an English engineer, is credited with the invention of the eraser (1770). Up until that time, people usually used rolled-up pieces of white bread to erase pencil marks, and bread as a staple food is suggestive of a completely different narrative. As you can see I’m just following thoughts as they occur to me. Hopefully making the idea of undertaking some research interesting, and perhaps helping to confront that old art/science divide that so many of us worry about. I also thought it fascinating that when in 1858, Hymen Lipman received a patent for attaching erasers to the ends of pencils, it was invalidated because it combined two existing products rather than an invented new one.

Coda:

A while after putting up this post I came across the work of Lucienne Rickard. She had a project based at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, whereby she spent weeks drawing large images of critically endangered species in graphite. She would draw lost species as well, deer and crayfish, mice and turtles, a lake newt and a robber frog and when she had finished each drawing she would rub it out. The last drawing to be done was of a critically endangered swift parrot and a crowd came on the final day to watch it being erased. Each drawing had been done on the same sheet of paper and as she had erased these drawings, shards of 25 rubbers, the shavings from many sharpened pencils and removed graphite particles were collecting on the floor below it. Ghosts of all the drawings could be seen as you looked carefully at the paper, remains of lost drawings caught in the fibres of the paper and haunting the final image of the parrot, as it too was erased. In all she had drawn 38 images of disappearing or disappeared flora and fauna, each one reduced to a ghost of its former self by the process of erasure. 

Lucienne Rickard: extinction studies 

In Rickard's work we can see the act of erasure being used as a powerful metaphor, she takes Rauschenberg's idea of erasing the work of another artist and uses it to raise awareness of our collective responsibility to the environment. 

See also:

Erasers, rubbers and scrapers
Graphite
The pencil: Sustainability

Sustainability resources

Paper, mobile phones and screens

Why ink sticks to paper

Christopher Cook: Graphite and painterly drawing

Christopher Cook: Cumulus: Graphite 

I have looked at graphite as a drawing medium in an earlier post, but like all pigments graphite powder can also be dissolved in resins, oils and mineral spirits. Christopher Cook makes his own graphite substances which work more like lubricants, a role that graphite has often taken when used in metal casting, as it was used to lubricate the inside of moulds.

Christopher Cook

Cook uses his graphite in a similar way to certain mono printing techniques. Degas in particular used to work on glass plates with ink, rags, brushes and turps washes, in order to explore the potential of ink’s liquidity and ability to suggest forms by playing with the way light and form could be suggested by scumbling, stroking, washing and rubbing into the surface.

Degas

All you need to make mono prints like these is a sheet of glass or plastic, some oil paint, some rags, turps and brushes, then if you put an image underneath the glass sheet you can see it as you move the ink about, but not well enough to be restricted to copying the image below. It's a great process to use if you are trying to simplify an image and at the same time add atmosphere and painterly qualities. 

There are some how to do it videos online. 

A good introduction to tools and textures and working on a plastic sheet.

Monoprint combination techniques

An artist at work using mono print processes

Drawing on the back of the paper mono print process 

For best quality an etching press can be used for plastic plates, but Degas would have just used a wooden spoon and would have carefully burnished the back of his paper, carefully lifting it from one corner in order to see if he had transferred enough ink onto his paper. 

Below is a reference to graphite as a sculptural material which should be linked to my earlier post on graphite.
Life sized skeleton that can vibrate itself into nothingness.