In her Draw Together substack, Wendy MacNaughton gave her GUT (Grown-Ups Table) subscribers an assignment to explore the graphite tools they had—some of which may be pencils. We are going to explore graphite, sharpening, and drawing techniques using graphite over the next few weeks. As it turns out, pencils, and the sharpening of pencils, are topics I have a lot to say about. These thoughts were all swirling in my mind so I had to get them out.
When I was young in the 70s, we used hand-cranked sharpeners. In my kitchen at home and in the kitchen at Grandmother’s house, we had noisy hand cranked pencil-gobbling Berol sharpeners mounted on the wall and we used them almost daily. The cedar shavings produced an aroma that now makes me nostalgic for practicing my cursive and drawing horses at the kitchen table.
Today, I keep a compact, electric Xacto sharpener on my kitchen counter, but it traps the scent inside. Similarly, the workhorses that sharpen about 4,000 Ticonderogas a year in my classroom only release their scent when emptied. At home, I use my Xacto for my Ticonderogas and my Crayola colored pencils and I use a small hand-held sharpener for my more precious Prismacolor pencils.
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My dad, to this day, always carries a carpenter pencil in his pocket. In the avocado green and harvest gold days of my childhood, he often mounted one behind his ear. He has always sharpened his pencil with his pocket knife. I didn’t understand that when I was a kid. Hand-cranked sharpeners were fun and efficient machines and they had that great grindy sound. And why did he often use those flat, wide stubby pencils that were so uncool and had no erasers?
During this last week, Dad was here in Oregon for a visit, and lamented the fact that he had forgotten his pencil at home. We were building a cedar fence—which happens to smell just like pencils—and he was marking boards for cutting. He settled for a black #2 Ticonderoga. As he sharpened it with his pocket knife, he told me a story about the day he discovered that Roger, his house builder friend, also carried a carpenter pencil daily. That got me thinking about how your pencil choice is a defining part of you, and how you interact, communicate, and connect with the world. That was a moment that these two men found they shared something pretty unique.
I sniffed the boards as I carried them back and forth between where he was mounting them and the chop saw where I cut them.
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In college, as an undergrad physics student, I discovered my perfect pencil companion: a Pentel mechanical pencil with a side clicker, rubber grip, and changeable eraser. I used the translucent 0.5 mm lead ones and had a small collection in tan, red, and—I think—purple. With their precise leads, I quoted (and drew) professors, I noted laws and theorems and I expressed the solutions to complex equations in many, many quad-ruled notebooks for my math and physics classes. I loved that they never needed sharpening. I have one of my old tan ones to this day and recently found that I could obtain a whole box of siblings for it with fresh rubber grips that are not disintegrating. I also got a box of blue 0.7 mm ones for my daughter and then took some of them for myself. Now I use both to write in my teacher planner and to draw all over the sticky notes at the kitchen table. I do still love their precision and perpetual sharpness.
I have also been using my mechanical pencils to draw in my sketchbook rather than deal with the dreaded Pencil Drawer. You see, I recently gathered all of my art materials from the nooks and crannies around the house and am in the process of organizing a home studio in our tiny extra bedroom/guest room. The pencils were haphazardly dumped together in a large drawer. I haven’t been using any of them and it’s been a year.
Over time, I have amassed a collection of a hundred or so artist pencils. I’ve always drawn and painted and so many people have given me pencil sets as gifts over the last forty or so years. Some sets were opened and the 4B pencils extracted, and some of them lay waiting for decades for their turn to be chosen for a project—like so many of us artists stood waiting to be chosen for a sports team in school. In the drawer, pencils from my first college art classes in the late 80s hung out with my most-used Derwents from my prolific creative phase in 2006 (that was one of the tins I actually opened). They also mingled with my son’s pencils from his graphic design program in college and many were gathered, rubber banded, in small diverse groups that often included charcoal, ebony, and white pencils.
We have had these intensely creative phases of our lives. Now I was left with this concentration of potential art energy, yet I had not been accessing it.
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After the fence stood completed and my dad was on his long drive home, I brought out my whole collection of pencils for a grand reunion on my kitchen table. Each one would get attention. Most of them sported knife-sharpened tops, a few were untouched, and some looked like a third grader had been asked to use them to write an essay (with the lead broken about a half inch below the end of the wood—how does this happen?). I took roll call and lined them up according to the loudness of their voice. I counted them, sorted and introduced them to friends with common interests—charcoal, colors, water solubility—and placed them in my favorite storage vessels: tin cans with the tops pried off.
We ate a lot of black beans during my dad’s visit, so I happened to have a lot of cans just waiting for an opportunity to hold pencils. As I sorted the pencils into cans, I remembered moments of the time we had just shared.
I miss my dad so much when he goes, and from this visit I’m left with these memories. Without his trusty carpenter pencil, he grabs the short black Ticonderoga, digs in his pocket for his knife, and stands in the sunshine next to the chop saw, cedar saw dust scenting the air, sharpening in that same way he has done for years. I understand it now; it doesn’t waste any lead and it produces both thick and thin lines. I like those qualities too when I’m drawing.
Another memory from this visit is completing cryptogram puzzles together at the table. We are writing the solutions using stubs of some cute, pastel Ticonderogas with perfectly good erasers. One of my third graders had snapped them in half before suddenly moving last year and I later salvaged them. I wonder what those special pencils meant to her and what was happening to cause her to break the ones she had kept. She’d given some away to friends—an attentive teacher notices these things—and had kept just a lavender and a peach one. Who had bought them for her? Was it a special occasion?
*****
When he set up the angle on the chop saw and marked the first board, Dad told me, “A good carpenter tries to cut the pencil line in half.” Like him, I have a perfectionistic streak, so I tried every time, and while most were close and some weren’t at all, I got a few good cuts in. The fence turned out beautifully, even with my imperfect cuts, because he builds everything with a deep knowledge of craftsmanship, and love for his family and the job itself. I also know where to find every spot on that fence that has a secret 1, 2 or 3 penciled in to the cedar in his writing so that I when I brought the cut boards back they were in order. Did you know that graphite is more permanent than Sharpie when exposed to outdoor conditions? I read that recently on a gardening website. His writing will be forever on that fence.
Graphite and the pencils that encapsulate graphite have meaning to many of us. We have our favorites and our preferences. We have our stories about pencils which are written in our memories. And to complete the circle, we can use them to write our memories and to bring our memories back into focus. (Incidentally, I’m writing this on a computer. Hm.)
This week, I am going to sharpen my artist pencils with my pocket knife and then, I’m going to start drawing with them again.
Your pencil fetish is strong! And far, far more organized than mine.
Love your way of connecting materials, thoughts, and experiences in this text.