A friend gave me a set of pencils recently. It was a well-intentioned gift. I received it gladly even though I don’t, as a general rule, like being given art materials. I already have masses that I use very sparingly. It’s unlikely that I’ll ever get something that I want but don’t already have.

These were charcoal pencils, with a couple of additional items used for charcoal drawing: Dense black charcoal sticks, one stick of hard white chalk, an eraser and an object like a tiny spear made of compacted paper, called a tortillon. But here’s the thing: I decided a thousand years ago that I didn’t like charcoal as a medium. In fact I’ve never understood how anyone gets good results from it because the couple of times I picked up charcoal sticks, all I ever got was sooty fingerprints and smudgy scratches on paper.

However, out of a need to create a truth out of the beige-lie I told by claiming to be happy with the gift, I decide to at least break the seal on the small flat container. I pull out a pad of paper and make a couple of tentative strokes. I am surprised to find that there’s something satisfying about these raw black marks. The very blackness is satisfying. I switch to one of the sticks of charcoal provided in the kit: Yet more black. Velvety, deep, rich.

My fingers are sooty, yes. I am quite fussy, for an artist, about keeping my hands clean, particularly the fingertips. But I fetch paper towels, wipe my fingers clean and return to my practice sheet. I cover it with scrapes and marks. I use the tortillon to smooth out irregularities. I’m delighted to find that it’s quite easy to get clear lines, then smudge them, reinforce the original lines, then to use the eraser to erase the smudges.

To my amazement, I have to admit that I’m enjoying charcoal. It’s very late in my life to find a whole new dimension opening up, learning to use a medium that most other artists leave behind early in their careers — but what to do? The spirit has seized me! I must draw! When Bins comes back from his walk, he finds me leaning over my drawing board, scraping a sheet of paper with the side of a charcoal stick. “What are you doing?” he wants to know. “Destroying some nice white paper?”

“Pooh,” I say. “I’m expressing my artistic nature!! Something you wouldn’t understand!” He waggles his moustache and makes a great show of tip-toeing out of my studio. No doubt he imagines that I will soon get bored and return to being a lazy lump of snooze, as is my norm.

But two weeks have flown by and I am still sooty-fingered and smile-wreathed. Nowadays, whenever Bins sees me blacken yet another sheet of paper, he sighs and turns on the microwave. “Tea?” he asks. “Of course,” I answer, staring fondly at my latest masterpiece.

Manjula Padmanabhan , author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column

 

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