Revisiting graphite

From 7 February 2012, when I was developing my "over-writing" project in the Book Arts course. It might be time to revisit it, and to use graphite more extensively and experimentally.

...

Another strand to this project is to be aware of subtle things and " meaningful accidents". For instance, using a fine pen that was running out of ink needed really hard pressure, and the paper underneath ended up covered with impressions - and the sheet of paper under that one still showed some marks - so before covering it with graphite, I used the defective pen to write another text, which bit deep into the paper. After 9B graphite had been added and polished, it became reflective and almost readable -

On the other side, a light coat of graphite on the raised texture of the writing, and denser graphite around the edges to try to pick up the fainter marks of the ghost writing -

It looks like "nothing" - and in a way, it is...

Book du jour - using lots of ink

 All weekend I've been investigating graphite and ink (again; still!) - and getting back to the "journey lines". First is the large sheet of black paper which was splattered with some india ink that was left to dry, and then I put some lumpy things - actually cardboard letters saved from another project - under it. Top left says 11.45 and by the time I got to bottom right, 12.28. If the paper had been any larger, drawing a line across it would have meant moving my body, not just the arm. The letters made lumps in the lines, but not discernable shapes.

Seeing how the graphite slid over the ink, I wanted to see if ink would slide over graphite. On the left is a lumograph (china marker) crayon, covered in ink; on the left, rubbing with 9B graphite. These are on a smaller scale and more densely rubbed, so the letters do "read". Both are covered with ink and the ink rubbed off before it dried, as it looked as though if the ink dried it would completely cover the marks.

 The china marker looked ugly but the graphite shone up a treat against the dark background. From then on it was a matter of trying out various papers and removing the ink from the graphite before it dried. This is black paper - well, actually grey - showing unremoved ink on the right -

 Rather than drawing horizontal lines I found a piece of fabric I'd printed last year with journey lines in puffa paste. The raised surface was great for rubbing, and letters could be put on top of the fabric. Once one side of the paper was inked and polished, I did the other side; by then the graphite was "harmless" - it didn't come off and make the fabric dirty.

 To protect the fabric around the paper edges I put down a layer of tissue paper - this didn't interfere with the impression of the lines. After some happy hours listening to Radio 4, I had samples on black (grey) paper, white paper - both about 90gsm; the tracing paper that comes in a pack, which is more like onion skin; tissue paper; moon palace paper (bottom); and lower right, pearlescent paper rubbed with wax candle ... not exactly a mistake, but something I probably won't repeat -

The ink makes the paper look burnt, especially the thinner paper in the way it goes crinkly - and it feels like stiff, thin leather.  Either the ink, or the graphite, or perhaps the frequent washing, is hard on the hands - makes your skin too feel like stiff, thin leather.

The playing with "technique" [let's call this repetition  Process...] is fairly mindless - apart from needing to be on the alert for unexpected things that could lead elsewhere. I could have been more deliberate about forming words with the letters, or making the papers of a size to use for a book. Perhaps that will come next with fresh paper and more ink (my supply is now used up!), or perhaps these papers will undergo further punishment and turn into something else ... something as yet unimaginable.

Book du jour - graphite

This rather geographical-looking bit of rubbing is inspired by the sublime graphite works of Guiseppe Penone. It didn't start out with any geographical intent, but as experimentation - how to get different shinynesses on black paper. The geographical aspects - maps of counties or types of vegetation - revealed themselves, and now I'm thinking how this can move from "map" to "book", from small to large-scale (local to global?)...

My samples are A4-size; Penone's works, shown at Haunch of Venison last year, are rather larger -

Another great use of graphite is Tracey Rowledge's Surface at the Jerwood a couple of months ago - an entire wall densely covered in graphite.

It seems the simpler the finished work, with such "rich" materials, the more associations it carries.

In my quest to discover why graphite is shiny, I have discovered that the harder forms (like pencils designated "H" rather than "B") have corresponding larger proportions of filler: clay and wax. (This varies from brand to brand.) Graphite is carbon and its structure is flat hexagonal plates which slide over each other - this makes it a good lubricant. Carbon isn't a metal but has some metallic properties, including shine. However, some people insist graphite is dull. Are they getting mixed up with charcoal, which is almost pure carbon? Why are they different, anyway...?

Going back to the dictionary definition of graphite: "A soft, steel-gray to black, hexagonally crystallized allotrope of carbon with a metallic luster and a greasy feel, used in lead pencils, lubricants, paints, and coatings, that is fabricated into a variety of forms such as molds, bricks, electrodes, crucibles, and rocket nozzles. Also called black lead, plumbago."

And from the information here, we learn that it comes down to the allotropic form - the geometrical arrangement of the atoms. Apart from the crystalline graphite and diamond forms, there is also an amorphous form, found in smoke and soot - and charcoal.

Book du jour

Graphite on strips (3 1/2", 8.5cm) of japanese paper - a rubbing from one of the smashed car mirrors. The intention was to ink it up, but once it was in book form, it looked good as is -

So I made another to ink up; the graphite is revealed by polishing the page, and the cover (such as it is) has flaps that fold out -

Nor was that it for the ink. This next structure came to me in a dream - long thin pages, mostly machined together, and then using the long thread-ends from machining to handstitch into separate pages in the loose part of the book. The neon green happened to be on the machine, and the red dots were lying around (I call this "the aleatory method" - it happens by chance) -

Lots of ink and quite a lot of time later - the green is vestigial and the red has been concealed -

 The structure is strange -

Finally (for now),  works in progress -

The two small books of newspaper aren't stitched together yet; I'd like to add "something" (other than thread or graphite!) but don't know what. The large book is tissue paper - it crinkles up nicely but is too big, or else doesn't have enough pages, and is the most unsatisfying thing I've made lately. During the inking the wet pages stick together and have to be separated before they dry and stick together - separating tissue paper takes a long time!

Line as text, text as line

While gathering - or rather, separating - blog posts into categories related to college work, I started a new category relevant to my project: "line as text, text as line". One consequence is that I'm on the active lookout for relevant images, and the first in the new collection is by Gill Banks -

The character and density of the marks she uses to make these lines are right on target for me, true inspiration - they raise all sorts of interesting possibilities. Sewn into paper (horizontally?), they will have a different character on each side of the page. Sewn into paper covered in graphite they will become smudgy as the thread - perhaps a soft thread? - gathers graphite. Will a waxed thread resist the dusty look? Could the redness of that red line survive stitching into graphite? Perhaps the stitching should happen first? What about using overlay ... perhaps glassine paper?

What about stitching into cloth and applying graphite or wax to that? What about using some of my dyed indigo pieces? What about stitching into/onto my screenprinted journey line fabrics? (If fabric is going to be a book, it needs to be not floppy ... or does it?) Am I making a book or trying to find "the right kind of line" and then decide how what it's "saying" can be put into some sort of book format...

Hmm, another example of "I know what I think when I hear myself speak". All that is needed now is action!

Meanwhile, here's one I prepared earlier -

"Sweating the hole"

Graphite in performance - Stuart Brisley using his body, and his sweat, to draw a place of darkness. He's covered his face with vaseline, which resists water, and sweat comes out through the scalp instead. The work starts off calm and tame, with a pinch of powder from a large bag -

but gets much, much messier -

until, in about 25 minutes, a wonderfully blackened surface, augmented by wetness, is achieved -

Watch it on video here (performed in 1997), and read about it at stuartbrisley.com. The piece was inspired by an invasion of mice, and he says that the hole might "be" a part of the self that is unavailable to the conscious mind. The sweating, which here comes from the physical exertion of the performance, is also a characteristic of fear. "What seems to lie in the centre is the essential ambiguity of the whole event where at different times and in different ways both positive attributes and negative effects are in action. ... What is conceived has to be overcome."

Book du jour - another inky page

It started with a failed photocopy of two pieces of embossed handmade paper, which already looked like book pages. I used a brush pen and copied some quotes from Michel de Certeau, knowing they would be covered up at the end of the day (copying text is a way to read it slowly). Then I ran a dressmaker's wheel over the text to get lots of puncture marks, and wrote on the back with a stylus to get texture in the black part.

Brushing on black quink resulted in some blue areas - a nice surprise -

The camera angle doesn't show it, but the black has been gone over with graphite, which didn't obscure the areas where writing  had already taken the blackness off.

On the back, some ink seeped through, and when I rubbed the periphery with graphite, the areas that hadn't quite dried, after misting to get the paper buckled, got very dark. The quink separated into bluey and orangey as it seeped through the holes. It is ugly and pointless.

And it feels uncomfortably like "play without a purpose" - I seem to be happy to dance round at the edge of the hole or tunnel that represents The Final Project (the show in September is getting ever closer...). The project seems to be moving away from "everyday journeys" into a dark area that I don't want to grapple with. Which perhaps explains my preoccupation with the form and look of the thing rather than the meaning or intent ... but you need that sort of focal point for this sort of Project. At the end, a piece of written work, a justification and explanation, accompanies it. Maybe the words are written once you see the final work (you explain it to yourself?) but that seems a bit late in the day to me! It's easiest to keep a focus, I find, if there are some key words or a title to keep coming back to. At the moment I have tooooo many such words, too many directions. That's ok for the next few weeks, during which I'll write down as many of those words as I can access, and during which we have an individual tutorial, which will involve gathering the work done since the Unit 1 assessment - another chance to get perspective and clarity. The book fair is out of the way (it was fun to make some "different" books), and further home improvements are on hold. So, it's just a matter of spending a lot of time in the studio - no excuses. And yet, and yet ... days like today, this sunny Saturday, alone at home while "the kids" are out, could be days of solid studio work; but I've been diddling about on the computer (also known as Doing Research...) and produced only the unsatisfactory page shown above. 

Too much information? A tempest in a teapot? "Oh we all go through that"?

How to take it forward:

-use the brush pen more - it makes for interesting writing

-can de Certeau's quotes be taken back into the work in another way

-the white pages/black border format is good for a codex but needs to be on both sides of the page (and not have a further white border

-the black toner resists water (does laserjet ink resist water?)

-avoid greyness of graphite - make it dark or don't use it

-rows of dots, with ink accumulation into their fibrous edges - are these "line as text"?

-gather and print relevant blog posts

-mind map, augmented by thesaurus

-re-read project proposal

More than a year ago we were asked to consider "what sort of book would you like to make" - many of us couldn't give a quick or cogent answer. Thinking hard about this would be another good thing to do - it's not all about the form, or even the content.

Book du jour - a thread path

A long strip of tissue paper, and an idea of sewing into the long pages of a concertina book ...

And applying graphite. I remembered from Dorothy Caldwell's workshop, years ago, that when you do a rubbing of embroidered fabric, it's like an x-ray because the threads on the back show up too ... so rubbing all the stitched pages at once would produce ... what ... perhaps the entire path of the thread?

 Pulling up the thread to "gather" the pages produced another kind of path -

I left the thread in the book, curling the ends between the first page and the cover to hold it securely.

Layers of threads revealed by graphite (or wax?) rubbings is yet another thing to explore/develop in the next few weeks.

Book(s) du jour

Start, just start ... somewhere ...

Strips cut off the edges of photocopies were lying around, as was a thesaurus, so I opened it at random and started writing on the back of the strips with a non-inky pen. So far, the words are invisible on the front and look white but are backwards on the black side. A pile of tissue paper made a nice spongey surface for writing and made the letters sink in better. Then, out with the graphite and the words appeared. They don't exactly make exciting reading, but do supply the necessary line of text. Next, writing on the back - not over-writing; the graphite acts as carbon paper, an another line of text appears, also legible should anyone care to read it, on the black side.

Pretty boring so far, though. I was ready to abandon the idea - which wasn't really an idea, just "start somewhere and keep going" - but decided to keep going. I glued the sections into a concertina and added covers (long, thin strips of mountboard) - and this is what happened -

By opening the book in "the opposite way" - using the top edge as "the spine" - you use the weight of the covers to produce a 3D shape. Suddenly the project got interesting. That long strip could be a sort of journey ... or a timeline ....

By the end of the afternoon I had several similar books -

The largest is some textured black paper that was written on (while listening to Just A Minute; words were taken from those heard) and covered with graphite on both sides - so shiny! -

 Another had a wiggly "path" drawn on the black side and the white side darkened -

 To hold them closed, and to have a place for titles etc, I made loops of paper and wrote the titles before gluing the loop -

In order of making, they are (l to r) - Intention (Roget 617);  Evolution of script;  Playing Just A Minute;  Path there and back;  Fairy tales - and the small one is a different story, for another day. Titles are derived from the source of the text copied/used/evolved. The loops slide to the middle, if you like that look, but in the photo the books remind me of matchsticks ... incendiary devices ... (remember how you used to get books of matches?)

Messy stuff, the graphite. Maybe you can't see the smudges on the covers. If cleanliness is next to godliness, those covers have a ways to go. Black board might be a better idea. Or, wipeable plastic?

Book du jour - ink, graphite, print

When I finished printing my letterpress project on tracing paper, I started printing on some inky papers that were in my folder. Top left, black paper brushed with black Quink and streaked with graphite; others are newsprint with varying amounts and dilutions of Quink, with swathes of graphite on the lower left. At certain angles you can see the print on the graphite, at other angles - just dazzle or greyness. For the samples at top, the angle is important - unless the printed ink catches the light, it disappears.

At the top of the photo below, the final two pages of the "reappearance of words" text; below, printing on black paper with graphite rubbing, and printing on some strips of masking tape stuck onto a brown paper bag.

So many samples, and no clear direction ahead yet...

Book du jour

A square book - catalogue from a photography degree show some years ago - with shiny pages. Some are now painted over and/or crossed out, awaiting further treatment with graphite.

On this page I put lines between the lines of words before adding white paint, then scratched out some of the words, able to see them only once the white paint had been scratched off. I kept a list of the words and phrases that had been scratched out -

Those words were then used to overwrite the layer of graphite -

In certain lights you can almost read the words ... which may or may not make sense or be of interest ...

"Stacked journalling" - and graphite

The "over-writing" technique I'm using has many possibilities - they are exhaustively set out in a tutorial here (thanks, Sandy, for pointing it out). It's fun fun fun - do have a go!

My over-writing project arose from journalling in two ways - from the crossing-out of old journals, and from the delight in making textures with handwriting, initially writing down my secret (and very boring) thoughts . Now my focus is on copying out plangent* texts - with a view to suiting the medium to them. I'm still at the stage of trying to define and refine my intention - and if I continue, I'll have to "explain" how this fits into my "everyday journeys" project.

*plangent (it felt like the right word but I had to look it up) = loud and resonating, often melancholy.

Another strand to this project is to be aware of subtle things and " meaningful accidents". For instance, using a fine pen that was running out of ink needed really hard pressure, and the paper underneath ended up covered with impressions - and the sheet of paper under that one still showed some marks - so before covering it with graphite, I used the defective pen to write another text, which bit deep into the paper. After 9B graphite was added and polished, it became reflective and almost readable -

On the other side, a light coat of graphite on the raised texture of the writing, and denser graphite around the edges to try to pick up the fainter marks of the ghost writing -

It looks like "nothing" - and in a way, it is...