Paper and Light

Almost everything now is drawn on translucent paper. The heavier and more transparent the paper, the better. It's a fragile surface, hates liquid, is unforgiving of creases or dents, but equally will take endless erasure and a very thick build-up of graphite. But that isn't the most important thing about it. It's about what's left free and empty and open.

In effect, I want the paper not to be a consideration, not to have tooth, or colour or presence, and transparent or translucent slick paper provides that 'thought-free' quality as well as giving a liquid, opalescent luminescence to the finished drawing, hovering behind the element doing all the work, the graphite.

"Milton", SWOON, 2009
Linoleum cut, on tracing paper on found door, hand-colored, signed, 221 x 93 cm
Exhibition: "SQUINCHES AND PENDENTIVES" 

I can't find any working artists using this paper for drawing as a finished piece. Plenty use it to make paper sculptures. A few use it for collage or assemblages, and it's cropping up in contemporary darkroom photography, but not simple drawing.

Updated...
So a few hours later the postman delivers my first tin of the Derwent XL graphite blocks whose novelty appealed and whose reality is simply, as my friend in the North would say, 'lush'. And on the tin is a graphite drawing by Ian Hodgson, a new name to me.

And I think, looking at this, here's someone who has really mastered graphite as a medium, in and of itself, soft and hard, shiny and dark, luminous and shaded. And that fingerprint? Apart from any other meaning, it's a frank statement of the hand-madeness of a drawing, the physical work that goes into real drawing like this, no short cuts, no technology. And his artist's statement contains a paragraph which is genuinely interesting:

 The drawing techniques that I use expose other, seemingly invisible layers, and here the drawing process acts as a metaphor for the physical and psychological experience of my journey, as fragments of what went before are revealed on the paper.

Translucent paper tends to leave behind the traces of what was there, even with erasure, since the drawing always has two sides. And the 'wrong' side can tell a more 'authentic' story about how the drawing came to be, through mistakes, changes and adjustments.