« Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere. »
G. K. Chesterton (1874 – 1936)
Over the last few months, I have filled a coffee cup halfway to the brim with pencil stubs and it suddenly occured to me that while I happily take brand-new pencils and sharpen and otherwise sketch and draw them down to next to nothing, I knew nothing about the origins of such a wonderful and simple instrument and what one does with it.
I’m always tempted to look in an etymological dictionary when faced with a familiar word whose past I ignore, as if there was something in the path drawn by a word through history that would better explain its meaning.
Drawing and sketching are often used indiscriminately : a drawing can be sketched, a sketch drawn – the two words have become interchangeable in many people’s minds.
“Sketch” from Ancient Greek σχέδιος; – schedios, “made suddenly, off-hand”, from σχεδιάζω – schediazo, “to do a thing off-hand”) via Italian schizzo in the late1600’s (which also provided the Dutch schets, German Skizze, French esquisser and Spanish bosquejar). “Draw”, on the other hand, is an Old English term, from « dragan », which means to drag, and the first recored uses to signify drawing in the sense of a line left by a pen or another instrument, date from around the year 1200.
What really differentiates drawing and sketch is not so much technique as intent. While a drawing may be a finished piece of artwork, sketchy as it may be, it is nevertheless the beginning, development and conclusion of a particular idea or rendering. A sketch, on the other hand, while it can also possess intrinsic value and be quite detailed, is a step, often incidental and abandoned in mid-stroke, towards a final ulterior version. A drawing is generally made with a pencil or a pencil-like tool (charcoal, fusain, ink), but a sketch can be in any medium, including oils and watercolours, because the intent is to prepare an idea or record an observation in preparation for a work to come. (Just to further confuse things, a « study » can be a sketch or a drawing – in any medium. A cartoon, which we now think of as a humorous illustration, was originally a full-size drawing made by an artist as a preliminary design for a painting or other work of art. Lines from a cartoon could be transfered to a fresco by pricking pinholes along them and tamping with a pad and powdered pigment; for a tapestry, the lines would be transferred to the warp or foundation threads of the tapestry by redrawing them or placing the cartoon directly behind the loom.) However, the two terms, sketch and draw, overlap like cross-hatching, and are often interchangeable.
Drawing instruments have always been with us. From hands dipped in pigment in Lascaux and Altamira, Egyptian reed quills, Roman and medieval lead and silver stylii, it was the discovery of graphite deposits in the mid 1500’s in Borrowdale, Cumbria, that triggered the development of the pencil as we know it. The first use for graphite was military, to line the molds for making cannonballs, which initially resulted in the government closely guarding the mines, but the qualities of graphite as a drawing material were soon noticed. (The local populace had apparently found it very useful long prior to that for marking sheep. It’s tempting to imagine shepherds braving guardposts to retrieve lumps of graphite under the cover of darkness, smuggling them out under their cloaks. The deposit in Borrowdale is one of the purest, if not the purest, in the world.) The relatively brittle graphite sticks were first wrapped in string, then inserted in hollowed-out wooden tubes or holders, a sort of prototype pencil. Black lead was an old name for “graphite”, which was thought at the time to be a variety of lead, hence lead pencil, which is mentioned as early as 1688. While graphite replaced lead, the name stuck, so a lead pencil is lead only in name. (Graphite was also called plumbago, from Latin plumbum “lead”.)
The first mass-produced pencils were made in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1662. It’s tempting to see a relationship between the tool and the word “sketch”, but the link is, well… sketchy at best. Still, more than 400 years of seniority of “draw” over “sketch” seems to imply, by contrast between the careful minatures of the high Middle Ages and the exhuberant burst of movements following the Renaissance, a certain spontanaety and acquired freedom to be attributed as much to the hand as to the mind. The word pencil, by the way, has a slightly more exotic etymology, from Middle English, late 14th century, “an artist’s fine brush of camel hair,” from Old French pincel “artist’s paintbrush” (French pinceau), from Latin penicillus “paintbrush, pencil,” literally “little tail,” diminutive of peniculus “brush,” itself a diminutive of penis “tail”. (Even a word like “brush”, which sounds Anglo-Saxon, comes from Middle English, from Old French broisse “a brush,” probably from Vulgar Latin bruscia “a bunch of new shoots” (used to sweep away dust). When the word itself made the jump from brushes to the pencils we know today is unclear, but it must have been driven by industry.
Pencils, at any rate, are ubiquitous. From the days when Thoreau had to make his own (the war of Independance cut off the importation of pencils from England), pencils never gone out of style. By the 1890’s, plain wood shafts had given way to brightly painted ones, with brand names. Nowadays, the range is enormous. The pencil is definitely here to stay, despite a return of the stylus no longer accompanied by a wax tablet, but by a Wacom tablet. (The space race story about the NASA spending millions to develop a zero-gravity pen while the Russians used pencils is urban legend.) Nowadays, hardness ranges from 9H (a sort of graphite engraving tool) to 9B ( of practically chocolaty softness). Modern « leads » are a sort of dough made of graphite and clay, which is extruded into rods, cut the right length, and then kiln-baked. Coloured pencils and their many relatives are of course a whole other story.
And, not to forget the pencil’s faithful sidekick, the eraser : they appear in American English as « the thing that erases writing » in the closing decade of the 1700’s.) English natural philosopher Joseph Priestly is credited with coining the word « rubber ». (He also discovered oxygen, for which we have been very grateful ever since. He also doggedly defended the phlogiston theory, which didn’t garner him much favour in history books.) Originally made from India rubber, they were introduced introduced into Europe in 1744 by Charles Marie de la Condamine. The entry for caoutchouc or india rubber, in the 1788 New Royal Encylopedia has this to say : “Very useful for erasing the strokes of black lead pencils, and is popularly called rubber, and lead-eater.” A patent for eraser-tipped pencils was first deposited in 1858. (Caoutchouc, which is the term for unvulcanized rubber, is from the obsolete Spanish word cauchuc, from Quechua kauchuk. The Quechua are an Amerindian people, principally from Peru and maybe it would be wise to stop dictionary-hopping while I can still find my way back.)
For pencil sharpeners, you’ll have to consult Wikipedia without my benediction. No pencil destined for drawing and sketching should ever see the innards of one of those.
I’ve searched in vain for the influences of pencils on the general populace, though certainly the production of such relatively inexpensive tools must have had some effect. When were children allowed drawing lessons in schools ? What new drawing and sketching public did the cheap manufacture of pencils create, if indeed it did ? In the 18th century, army officers were expected to draw with skill and accuracy. Napoleon took with him to Egypt a whole contingent of artists, who busily sketched everything they saw. John Ruskin, the famous Pre-Raphaelite art critic (who criss-crossed Europe doing remarkable watercolours and pencil sketches of everything he saw, all the while protesting modestly that he couldn’t draw) wished to teach factory workers in Industrial England to draw and paint, not so that London parks would be filled with labourers toting sketchpads and easels, but so that they would aquire the taste of looking at nature and appreciating it, in a world that was seeing thousands flock from country to city. The naturalists who paddled up raging unexplored rivers, shivered on remote alpine slopes and pushed through thick jungles peering quizzically at insects and plants, were, for the most part, competent and often exceptional draftsmen. George Washington surveyed Ohio Territory, pencil in hand, in 1762 and Benjamin Franklin advertised pencils for sale in the Pennsylvania Gazette (no pun intended). John Steinbeck went through more than 300 pencils writing East of Eden. You’d have thought his friends would have provided a typewriter. Pencils and history are in it together to a degree only surpassed by navigational instruments.
All part of the history of the humblest of drawing and writing tools. By the way, ever wondered just how they get the lead in there ? Look at any pencil carefully and you’ll see it’s really two half-tubes of wood glued seamlessly together. (Red cedar is the favoured wood nowadays.) Oh, and are you one of those people who can’t stop themselves from chewing on the things ? (I used to loathe lending pencils in elementary school, which would always be returned with the comment « What’s the matter, it still writes okay. » in response to my exclamations of dismay at repossessing an object that looked like a colony of beavers had been at it with undisguised enthusiasm. I didn’t want my pencils to be just functional, they had to have a certain esthetic quality as well, and besides, a saliva-impregnated eraser in a crimped and gnawed incisor-marked ferrule was probably not very hygenic at best.) The paint is normally non-toxic, but certainly not nourishing, except perhaps spiritually. Best beware of cheap pencils from abroad, though.
With the invention of photography, sketching naturally became a skill less practiced, efficaciously replaced by the camera. Nevertheless, I’d be tempted to say we live in an age of drawing and sketching. While painting can be a skill that takes years to perfect, pencil and paper are far more accessible – and above all eminently portable. They let us move between between two worlds, the physical and the imagined, with fantasy being the stepping stone. Sketching and drawing means paying attention to things that surround us, understanding their structure, finding interest and meaning in their line and volume. Given the increasing estrangement between the comforts of life and the meaning of life, a pencil is one of those resolutely low-tech useful everyday things that cannot be improved upon, thus excusing us from our duty to be up to date, providing a most intimate and spontaneous interface between imagination and reality. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pretending pencils can save the world, but when grasping at straws, any straw will do.)
We have all the advantages, the grandest being of course, inexpensive paper and pencils, access to travel, to books and to art, and, through sketching and drawing, to the rich interior realms of the imagination. It would be a shame not to make use of it.
All it takes is a few pencils and some paper. And speaking of pencils, I have been going through a lot of them lately, about which more next time.
ROBERT HOLDSTOCK (1948 – 2009)
Robert Holdstock, the author of Mythago Wood died at 4 am in the morning of Sunday 29 November, having been in intensive care since his collapse with E. coli infection on the 18th . He was only 61.
It’s not only a shock, but incredibly, incredibly sad, few authors were so full of Story, so eager to put words on myth, to put myth into new words, to make paths for us to wander at will, deeper into myth and deeper into ourselves. He was a magnificent human being and a friend. We still have his stories, but how I wish we still had Rob.
Our thoughts go out to his wife Sarah and Rob’s family.
