The pencil is a force to reckon with when one sees its value. It is a vessel of communication, imagery and sometimes, mysterious messaging. Ancients used burned embers to scribe messages and even hot smoke on cold stone to leave markings. These marking methods would dramatically progress. Alongside cutting into stone and spraying coloured crushed plant juices on cave walls for more permanent purposes, the need for discovering something to write with and draw onto historical documents became more and more needed as it grew alongside the human experience. Art itself became a part of the social framework of many nations. One cannot refute the importance it took on within Egyptian or North American Indigenous history as but two monumental examples.

It developed into beautifully complicated eras of antiquity, spanning globally, filled with both truth and hierarchal embellishment, that could be discussed in great length. This story started in BCE and grew from ancient times to where it has sustained ever since in various forms. The pencil was becoming a strong character between the lines of the story, as it was developed alongside the sea of mediums that were to come. 

Plant dyes, natural chalks, graphite (English black wad), charcoal, inks and clays were some of the main elements that began the journey toward the modern medium we call pencil.

Many prominent artists historically utilized charcoal and inks like the intrepid Da Vinci and later graphite and charcoal could be incorporated by Degas, Ingres and Picasso to name a few. The story was advancing rapidly. 

Incorporating gouache, watercolour, oils, acrylics and more modern mediums has created a beautiful garden for the art world. This variety should be celebrated among those in the art community with admirers and buyers of these works showing us that art truly is subjective and above all, it should represent freedom for the artist and the person looking for something unique for themselves. The pencil and its coloured counterparts should not be discounted and should be seen as yet another member of this fine art family of mediums.  

My particular choice of the pencil and coloured pencil, have a very interesting 'ancestral' history. Relatives include the conte stick created by Napoleonic science core engineer Nicholas-Jacques Conte in the late 1700's, and the 'Bernacotti', Italian invention of the juniper wood casing to hold graphite cores. Early words used to describe the precious writing material included 'graphein’ from the Greek meaning 'to write'. And then there is the heroic story of how eraser tipped pencils were used during wartime to help allied pilots escape their captures by secretively keeping tiny maps within the tips, enabling them to navigate their escape paths, fooling the enemy within a seemingly every day object. - (Visit the Keswick Pencil Museum in England for more on that one...amazing.) I think it gives new meaning to the phrase, "Good things come in small packages."

The humble pencil is far from humble...it is a part of history. It is from a family of incredible inventions. 

There is so much more to it, and this is but a tiny view of it all...and so the story continues.