WRITING|CREATIVE WRITING|MEMOIR

Playing with Charcoal Pencils

A hobby after my own “art”

All photos by author

Over a year ago, I wrote a post on how my Year 1 teacher clipped my artistic wings with a sweeping statement:

“Oh, Mario. You’re good at reading and writing. But you’ll never be good at maths or drawing.”

Leaving the maths out of the equation (pun not intended), that teacher taught me a lesson that I’m sure she’d never planned to deliver in the first place: never stop playing.

However, it would be another almost thirty-six years before I acted on the impulse of using drawing pencils on a blank page. Once I did, though, my Year 1 teacher’s words were banished forever.

From the start I refused to call my creations drawings or sketches. Like I explained in my post last year, there was never artistic ambition inside me, but a desire to recapture the magic a child feels when their stick-thin figures materialise in a notebook.

At the same time, I realised that I’d have to use art-related language. Drawing pencils, eraser, HB this, HB that. Some of it was new to me and I lapped it up like the six-year-old I pretended to be.

My hobby (for that’s what it was by now, even if I didn’t indulge in it on a regular basis) led me to…