Graphite, water, and synthetic paper: the journey of a self portrait.

I settled to read the last bit of a big book last night, but a look to my right, and there is my slightly askew, darkly atmospheric reflection in the evening’s double paned window glass. The lamp, hovering and lit, positioned to accommodate the book makes my distorted face glow in the swallowing murk. A spotlight on a bizarrely misaligned face in a dark room.

I am theater for no one. I am the tragicomic clown trapped in the thin margin of double paned glass between inside safety and outside darkness.

The impulse to do something with this is as clear as falling in love.

Resettled, having gathered water soluble graphite, eraser, water, brushes and synthetic paper, I begin.

Start, go, get dumb. Or, at least, as thoughtless as possible.

The impossibly complex lock canal system between neural primordial impulse and material is initiated, navigated. Make your impulse, your reverie LIVE in this graphite on this plastic paper. Canals are flooded, shifted and reopened to spill neurons into desire in greasy, soft, morbid, glorious, delicious,flowering, lyrical graphite.

Why graphite? It is silky, rich. Delicious. Responsive to such a degree that it will mirror the artist in ways that can be ludicrously uncomfortable. It is greasy and somehow also smoky. Obscene and luxurious and virtuous. It is my body cast as a net into dark waters.

There are initial lines proffered with a thin graphite cylinder encased in incense-cedar; a pencil. Maybe in the shape of one of humanity’s first tools. There is the bridge of my nose in a flourished gesture, that curve, just so. Leading to flicked marks denoting a much less discernible brow ridge. But there are no anatomical names in this moment. There is only preliterate signing. There is a gargantuan cupped hand cradling this curve in the smoky blackness, the slight profile of the skull. There is wet clay curdled into this rippled cleft, but by what immense weight impacting it? The brow. There is a watery hole where a boiled egg pushes out of an orifice, the eye. 

I wet the ever so slightly gummy little tin of graphite substance with a small, flat brush. The give of the brush, the playful fight of the bristles’ recoil is the lively conversation I have with one of my floor managers countless times.

The graphite mixture dissolves to the loving touch of water and cloying bristle, propelled by untold muscles and fascia, induced into action by electro chemical pulses. All of this is a chain of fluttering events to keep the lock system up to speed. All to meet the need of that initiating impulse.

Across and into the synthetic paper it glides and staggers. It careens and flutters.

Now I have a naked square stick of water soluble graphite. It is an extension of my body, too. Compacted together, and held in my fingers with tenderness. Semaphore ensues across the paper, devoid of direct language. The marks are the stew of ages, the food I ate hours ago, all the water and wine I have ever passed through my body. All guilt and elation carried for as long as I can recall. However I turned my body in half sleep the previous 16,425 nights.

These markings now mingle and slide and lash and shake and suggest and plead and insist. Then I batter and massage them with my finger. With water. With damp, filthy paper towel.

I pull them back out. And I reassert them.

I find the edgeless face. The needy orbs. The eyes can anchor, yes. I will clip in there and swing around. There is my half dissolved form, there is an intermediary surface of glass panes, there is the darkened outside patio with spotlights on reaching leaves, there is the darkened room behind me. And there is the flat paper, too. Folded, embracing dimensions.

All these things attempting to trap this moment, this impulse. Even if only for a moment.

The graphite capitulates, but surprises and mutinies, too. We fight and laugh and find accord and adamantly argue. We insist. We carouse.

The graphite moves with almost imperceptible resistance on the eerily smooth surface of the synthetic paper. That’s a choice, too.

The paper only just barely absorbs the material. There is only ever a miniscule zone of truce. It is uneasy, tenuous, miraculous.

This moment is all, and I watch, gleeful inasmuch as I can step out of thinking, as this moment oozes right out of my closing fist over and over again. I am the cat that has learned this lesson; do not clamp down, let it go so as to elongate the game. Give over to delight. Render form as a suckling mouth seeks out the teet in empty space.

All the voices and training I have accrued, how to maybe render or capture in materials on surface, I shut them all into rooms away from this moment. They call out suggestions, castigations, admonitions, tired homespun witticisms. But they are now muffled into edgeless, vibratory cacophony through the walls. Palpating lumps in a sleepy time blanket.

I collide and tumble with the graphite and water and paper. My holy fools. It is a game. And a test of each other’s will.

It is time to stop. I know because there is suddenly time in which to reflect and propose.