Or A Very Slim Book by Mervyn Peake
At a very trim twenty-two pages, The Craft of the Lead Pencil, by Mervyn Peake, is the briefest of excursions into the well-trodden realm of drawing manuals. * This said, the modest number of pages is no indication of the keen quality of the book, perhaps one of the best books on drawing ever written by an illustrator. †
Two things though. While Peake dutifully commits a few pages on shading cubes and globes, while he does give his thoughts on how to draw the human head, this little book will not teach you how to draw. Or rather not how to draw any one particular thing or develop any particular method, nor does it provide any tricks of the trade or clever shortcuts. This booklet is setting its sights rather higher.
And of course, Mervyn Peake is not just an illustrator. Painter, playwright, poet, but above all, Peake the novelist, who had such a masterful and original grasp of words, who made them roll over, beg, play dead and leap through flaming hoops. Thus, the slim 22 pages are multiplied a hundredfold, if you have the inclination to peer between the lines.
Naturally, even in an exercise that dutifully dons the mask of practicality, Peake cannot resist his tendency to hyperbolize, juxtapose and concatenate, hence the odd but beautiful phrases that crop up unexpectedly and the most unusual associations that are made in passing. Halfway through an exposé on pencil hardness, for example, he cannot resist a line of prose poetry: “Heaven and hell in a cedar tunnel”. Equally, his advice to novices treads a fine line between the avuncular and the inscrutable.
Witness the introduction:
“To make a drawing is to record an idea: an idea of a particular breed that can only be expressed through making marks on a piece of paper. This process alone can arrest, transmute, and give it permanence. For drawing should be an attempt to hold back from the brink of oblivion some fleeting line or rhythm, some mood, some shape or structure suddenly perceived, imaginary or visual. Something about a head that calls out to be recorded: something about… the dream; the alleyway; clown; broker; stone or lizard. The quicksands closing on a centaur’s head tokens no more of magic than the penny loaf. They both exist. Neither be afraid of the unorthodox subject nor in finding delight in the contemplation of commonplace things. Anything, seen without prejudice, is enormous.”
Follows a dozen solid pages of text so dense it is practically impossible to extract excerpts. There isn’t a sentence that doesn’t both stand on its own and link elbows so firmly with its neighbour they can hardly be prized apart, and the inner dialogue between writer Peake and draftsman Peake is so fantastically intense that each thought is refined to the equivalent of the most eloquent of brush strokes or most sensitive of pencil lines.
Even the simplest phrases could be expanded into chapters by less talented writer. “Beginners draw faces not heads” sums up in five words any novice’s arduous coming to grips with the shape of the head, so concentrated are they on rendering the details of features without anchoring them to the structures beneath. In almost geological terms, Peake drives home the geography of the head: ridges, ranges, creases and overhangs. He is a pencil-toting mountaineer on a mission; impossible to read the chapter on heads without coming away a little out of breath, and slightly dizzied by the view.
His words on the treatment of shadow are dutifully accompanied by a rendering of a block and an egg but are a concise nod to the imperatives of understanding spatial relationships. “There are no accidental shadows. It is best to think of the shadow as a result.” With no more than a few lines, Peake asks that the reader situate objects in space, conceive of their lighting, and understand their environment, the whole bound together by where and how a shadow falls. Peake makes the shadows tangible, even when they are in the invisible air.
It is a grand shame The Craft of the Lead Pencil is out of print. Much more than a primer for aspiring artists, it is a testament to the power of vision and the eager neediness with which we strive to retain and transform what we see. Twenty-two unassuming pages, but which sum up Mervyn Peake like none of his other publications can do. The voice speaking of his most intimate convictions, couched on his intentionally hyperbolic and flippantly provocative prose, disguised as practical advice, is not only touching but also intensely personal and universal. Peake, like many artists, was brash and vulnerable, opinionated and unsure, incredibly talented and filled with doubt. All of that is in this little book.
Every illustrator could do with a copy. Though he professes to write for a hypothetical “average” student, Peake is writing a precious essay of practical philosophy. He is outlining an approach to life through work, where the artist teeters along the thin ridge between delight in and loathing of one’s own work, between the line that is just right and the thousands erased. His search for the sharp surgical elegance of a blunt economy of word belies his eagerness to convey his passion for line: “Line… can be a pure unbroken outline, thick or frail. It can be broken. It can stutter, flow or scribble. It is language.” It is poetry too, under Peake’s able pen.
 |
Nature doesn’t do lines. Nature does forms. Finding the thin graphite marks that resume, translate and evoke the complex contours of any form is an exercise in objective subjectivity (unless of course it is subjective objectivity) and a study in contradictions besides. When Mervyn Peake writes “heaven and hell in a cedar tunnel”, he is ostensibly referring to the “frailest of greys to the black of the tomb” as monochromatic values of light to dark, but it is a telling comment on the ambiguity of work’s worth, and through whose eyes. Peake is telling us that life in art (and art in life) is not black and white, but the subtlest of ever-shifting chiaroscuros. (Not exactly news, I agree, but it softens his periodically peremptory tone, where he chooses to draw a clear line rather than a muddled crosshatching of qualifiers, leaving it up to us to read in the half-tones.) It is a little booklet of pure inspiration, a window of modest dimensions opening on a vast inside-out world of imaginary vision. Drawing well is not the end, it is the means.
The brevity of the text (why so short, one could have hoped for much more) nevertheless brings it closer to poetry than prose; perhaps it is all the richer for the spaces it offers, where the reader can fill in between the lines with his or her own life with a pencil in hand; likely one of the reasons it would probably not appeal to those whom Peake claims he wrote it for. Nonetheless, it could be given to all art students. They would likely, for the most part, shrug it off, or disagree with his views, and put it away on a shelf. But, one thing is certain, they would come back to it in two or three decades, read it more carefully, now that Peake has nothing to teach them, and nod wisely at every word.
These are the words that close the book:
“What does it matter how long or how slow you are in this traffic of lead and paper? The advance from virtual blindness to that state of perception – half rumination, half scrutiny – is all that matters. The end is hypothetical. It is the journey that counts.”
*It is also hard to find, the one edition, published by Allan Wingate in 1946, between Titus Groan and Letters from a Lost Uncle, is now quite rare. (The well-trodden plot of drawing manuals, however, is so well trodden it is certainly now bare of any growing things but the most tenacious.) At the time of publication, it was well received and warmly reviewed; according to the art critic of Books of the Month ‘it was free of tiresome theories and full of sound advice of the sort to kindle the student’s imagination’.
† Writing about painting, art and imagery is something that novelists are notoriously poor at doing in a convincing manner. One of the best writers about the act of image-making is Russell Hoban, but that will be (hopefully) for another newsletter.
For more concerning the life and art of Mervyn Peake, please go the the offical website.
A CHANGE OF PACE
After keeping up with newsletters once a fortnight for what has been a most busy year, with equal measure of relief and regret, I’ve decided to reduce their frequency to one per month. I found myself struggling with them of late, increasingly so, to be truthful, and do not wish to turn them into slapdash affairs by attempting to maintain a rhythm that I simply cannot follow. (This said, I may manage to continue as before.) I hope to get back to normal as soon as my work load permits. Thank you all, and see you in either 2 or 4 weeks.
