ONCE CALLED SILVERPOINT

The humble pencil - everybody on every continent uses it - for everything mundane, from writing a grocery list to working out a math problem to solving a crossword puzzle, to doodling idly on a piece of scrap paper while chatting on the phone.

But this simple tool holds a much more elegant and powerful use - creating museum quality art. Amazing - a slender piece of wood with a round graphite stick in the middle - can, in the proficient hand, create masterpieces that cause hearts to flutter. Jan van Eyck way back in the late 14th century, Raphael, Michelangelo, Dürer, da Vinci, Holbein, and many, many others sketched with it, not for use as an end in itself, but as a prelude to a painting or etching. Before the 17th century this glorious medium was called silverpoint, and the stylus was made of silver or some other hard metal drawn on specially treated paper. There was no variation of strength in the line and no erasing; one error and you'd have to start over. In the 17th century the true pencil was invented, and gradually, because of its greater variety of use, the basic beauty of this tool became utilized for its own sake. None of the Old Masters in their apprenticeship started out as full-blown painters and sculptors. In the beginning was the siverpoint, then pencil. It was, and is the sublime springboard to the next art medium, and the next; or sometimes as an end in itself. Rubens, Van Dyke, Hogarth, William Blake, Ingres, Constable, Doré, Kathe Kolwitz and many more created the most powerful and touching black and white art in history!

Here's an interesting fact about the pencil: its hardness ranges from middle of the road HB, which is for general (non artistic use, i.e. school, office, business, short-order restaurants, etc.) to the glass cutting hard 9H (I never quite figured out what useful purpose that serves).

Then we return to HB and span through the opposite direction to the ultimate velvety-soft 9B - the Holy Grail to the pencil portrait artist. It renders such a soul-satisfying blackness -boundless as the moonless, starless night sky! On can draw so tenderly and lightly on the paper, leaving a hint of tone with a suggestion of grain at the edges, to darker and darker as one bears down (not too heavily, please, to avoid breaking off that ultra-soft graphite tip) to pop the art out of the paper into the third dimension.