Toe in the Water

Ballpoint Art

Ballpoint Art

In Question of the Day today, Lilli 🧿 ☕ is asking what TED talk we’d give at five minutes notice. I thought up four silly answers and then remembered something that I could expound on for some time. So I added it and called it ballpoint art.

It sounds as though I meant it as a joke but, in fact, I was recalling something from my first job after leaving school. I was employed as a Deceased and Insolvent Estates clerk in the High Court in Zimbabwe. To save money by recycling, we were given copies of old court cases recorded on recycled paper. We wrote on the backs of those pages and rarely bothered to read the legal exchanges on the other side.

That was when I discovered how ballpoint pens loved that coarse, off white old paper. It was just the right texture to make a ballpoint flow smoothly and give of its best. And, being who I was at the time, I made the most of it.

It started as mere doodling at the edges, something that I’ve not been able to stop myself doing all my life. But then I discovered some interesting effects that could be created, thanks to the loving relationship between ballpoint and paper. My doodles became pictures, growing increasingly intricate as I developed my skills with the unlikely instrument.

Pretty soon I was finishing my work as soon as possible and then using the rest of the day to create my (occasionally magnificent because of their complexity) pictures. Fine shading could be used, thanks to the rough surfaces of the paper and this, combined with my technique of using abstract shapes to build real subjects, meant that I began to use entire sheets for my drawings. I was able to create a sort of metallic effect that was in line with the trend in poster art at the time and I would spend hours in this task.

This happy time ended for two reasons. My fellow employees found out that they could pile work on to me and that I’d have it all done by midday. Towards the end, I think I was doing the entire department’s work while the others slumbered at their desks. When it reached the point that the work began to encroach on my afternoons, I realised that it was time to stop.

The other thing that happened was a crisis in confidence. The drawings became so complex and sophisticated that I reached a stage where my beginning of a sketch was so perfect (in my eyes) that I could not continue, for fear of ruining it by a misstep. My output shrank to a few uncompleted doodles in corners. I had taken ballpoint art as far as I dared.

There was only one answer to my dilemmas. I left the Court and found myself another job.

But I was quite serious in writing down ballpoint art as a subject that I could give a TED talk on. The intricacies and effects of the discipline are more than enough to fill a half hour of explaining. In fact, I may be the world’s sole authority on ballpoint art. The advent of the computer age no doubt means that the High Court no longer uses the reverse of outdated court reports to write draft letters on. It may well be that wonderful, textured and slightly discoloured recycled paper no longer has a use and has gone the way of all flesh.

Just one more tragedy in the life of a dinosaur.


Word count: 591