Graphite (in pencils) is a nearly invisible presence in our everyday lives. In becoming fascinated with this material I have found myself making work that, while still process driven, also wants to reflect the many deep associations that we have with this unique mineral. Rather than exclusively pursue traditional graphite drawings, I have decided to paint (in ink) upon expansive fields of pure graphite to highlight its materiality. Reflectivity (and depth), blackness, erasure and palimpsest, Earth’s all-powerful formative forces of pressure, heat and water, and above all graphite’s inseparable historic link to modern calligraphic handwriting – all of these things are suggested in the work. I think of this work as a meditation on the phenomenology of mark-making, and my focus on graphite the impetus for that investigation. There is a new sense of landscape and waterscape in this work, and new metaphorical allusions to the liminal connections between the manmade and the natural, all filtered through my own robust appetite for baroque spatial complexity (and a certain graphomania). In the process of making these paintings, the context of my work has expanded to embrace images that were perhaps only hinted at before…or maybe were only hiding under the surface.
Richard Feaster
March, 2004
