Mark of the Times: Charcoal and the Borough Group Kate Aspinall Introduction There are two thrusts to this exhibition. The first, dominant one is charcoal, the fact of its dexterity and efficacy in conveying forceful emotion. The second emerges not from the medium shared by all but two of these works, but from how this medium changed with the passage of time: how its particular qualities were harnessed by particular people at particular times and places. It is therefore not a consideration of similarity but of subtle distinctions. The pieces around us span just over ninety years, from David Bomberg’s (1890-1957) ink piece Unknown (1914) to Dennis Creffield’s (b. 1931) Jerusalem Wedding (2009), yet all of these pieces operate within a specific idiom in their handling of charcoal; that is, they operate within certain conventions that rely on certain gestures through certain tools and materials – for, if marks are like sounds and pictures are like language, then these pieces are a particular dialect with their own grammatical logic. 1 This logic is policed by the inherent possibilities and limitations of charcoal as a tool for making pictures. And there are strong arguments that the challenge of these material conditions creates a mental space for artists to meet outside the specificity of their time periods. 2 In other words, when the limits of drawing materials are engaged with, history is folded upon itself. 3 Looking around this gallery it would be tempting to claim something similar for the uses of charcoal that surround us, but we are not only looking at a short segment of time – looking at just two intimately linked generations – but also noting that each piece retains important traces of its particular historical embeddedness at a volatile point for practicing drawing. Over this ninety year span and particularly in the post-war period, which I will be predominantly addressing today, seismic changes were occurring around this group of practitioners, such as those relating to the use and proliferation of charcoal, to fashions within art education, and to beliefs of what artists can and should achieve through their practices. So this talk will not only address charcoal, but also how reading with a historically informed eye can extract meaning from the different ways its inherent properties were exploited. Charcoal the Elemental Charcoal is elemental in many ways. Aesthetically its rich, broad blacks contain a depth that graphite and even ink struggle to contend with. It is a by-product of fire – that primary symbol of transformation and reckoning. 4 And, it is elemental in our cultural imaginations too: coal, charcoal’s close relative, was the tool used by Callirrhoe, the ancient Greek who traced her departing lover’s shadow, and, for centuries has been celebrated as the mythical mother of drawing, and, by extension, of the Western European art tradition. 5 It is elemental in an additional way – it is a tool to clarify the timid idea, as it is to train the novice hand. It is such a fragile medium, crumbling as it is pressed and thus is little more than dust lying along the top of the paper, easy to brush away unless it is worked violently into the paper’s grain. For this it was a popular tool for apprentices in Renaissance studios, just as it still is in art schools today. Artists such as Durer and Leonardo Da Vinci used it to sketch in the basic shapes before switching to silverpoint, ink, or the then-harder natural chalks to work up the