GRAPHITE STEW

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GRAPHITE STEW is an unruly mash of works made primarily of graphite by 19 artists from the Bay Area and beyond. They use graphite to sketch out plans, articulate figures, record phenomena, make mirrored surfaces. They use graphite in the form of pencils, powder, even dissolved in water as a wash. Everyone has used graphite before; since the early modern age pencils have been standard tools for everyone from mathematicians to engineers to students to musicians.

And drawing itself is still so bizarre and miraculous. Drawing is universal and pre-human — beetles carve drawings in bark, goats trample lines across their territories, every culture has left drawings behind. The ability to translate an idea from the mind through the hand and into something visible, so that it can be communicated directly into someone else’s mind, is still one of the most treasured functions of the artist. Drawing can be immediate and direct, a way to quickly and precisely illustrate ideas. But it can also function like a surrealist painting, a modernist sculpture, a scientific photograph.

The works collected in this stew show this medium as anything but an interim step, displaying the breadth & depth of this mysteriously malleable metal.