Why I Keep Returning to Charcoal
Since I began Substack, the number of people subscribing has slowly grown, and I am getting close to one thousand readers.
Every day, messages arrive from distant countries and cities I have never seen.
Because I post not only finished drawings but also the process behind them, I sometimes receive comments about the thoughts I put into that process, or about how I think of drawing itself. There are people who pause over a single line, or over the white space I chose to leave. That alone keeps me going.
Today I want to write a little more carefully about why I chose charcoal as my medium, and about what I am thinking when I draw.
The day I fell for charcoal at first sight
It started with a single charcoal drawing I happened to see on Pinterest. My scrolling hand stopped, and I said out loud, “What is this.”
The particular texture of charcoal dust rubbed across paper. The way the memory of a line stays buried beneath the layers above it. The momentum of something drawn in one stroke, and the traces of repeated trial and error, coexisting in the same sheet. Finely rendered drawings are wonderful too, but what drew me in was the expression of chaos and negative space. The texture of it reached me through the screen, unlike anything I had seen before.
That same day, I went to the art supply store and came home with charcoal, paper, and an eraser. The moment I tried to draw, nothing went the way I wanted. The smudging would not look the way it looked in my head. The texture I was aiming for refused to appear. A light touch of my finger was enough to spread black across the page, and lines I thought I had erased remained deep in the fibers of the paper. I remember laughing, almost, at how ungovernable this material was.
I spent the whole day with charcoal in my hand. I failed sheet after sheet, and drew again. Somewhere inside that repetition, a texture I loved would happen to appear on the paper, and the happiness of that moment was real. I am still chasing that “happen to” feeling. It has not left me.
A line I could not have drawn on my own
Charcoal is a material that easily betrays your intentions. And yet within that betrayal, a kind of accidental beauty appears. A single line that came out of my own hand but that I could not have drawn on purpose. Such lines exist. When one of them appears on the paper during a session, my hand stops. Did I draw this, or did the charcoal draw it through me. The boundary becomes unclear for a moment.
I am still searching for the line that is mine alone. Even so, many people have told me, “Only you could have drawn this,” or “Thank you for sharing it,” and every time I feel genuinely grateful. What matters is not only each individual line, but what I leave and what I erase. Where, inside that back-and-forth, I choose to stop. The accumulation of those small decisions is, I think, what people call sensibility.
What appears in the white space is the outline of the person looking
My drawings are chaotic, full of negative space, with faces whose thoughts are hard to read. Still, they are not indifferent. What might this person be thinking. That time you spend facing something you cannot fully understand. I believe it works the same way toward another person standing in front of you.
In the white space, an outline I cannot speak for appears: the outline of the viewer. The viewer’s own self. People close to them. People they have not yet met. The drawing may become an occasion to think, even briefly, about the unspoken feelings of someone nearby. I want to make the small radius around me into a place where it is a little easier to breathe, and that is why I draw. I hope the people who see my work can also touch that feeling, even slightly.
From here on, I am writing for paid subscribers. This is the kind of content I hope you will sit with rather than skim. I write not only about finished pieces, but about the hesitations and decisions behind them, and about the act of looking itself.
my work resonates with you, I would be glad to have you walk alongside the writing and the drawing, through a paid subscription or a Founding Member tier.
