POWER TO THE PENCIL

With our focus on the power of the analogue pencil in these pages, it was amazing to see the protests in France use the pencil as a symbol for the murders at Charlie Hebdo. The pencil and artist’s paint brush indeed seem to retain their iconic hold on the imaginations of our society.

Of course the vast irony of the terrorist murders is that now millions of us have seen the cartoons who would not have seen them if the journalists had not been killed.

Still, to see the totemic power of the pencil and brush in our western culture is amazing. It is also amazing to think that mere drawings triggered such terrible events.

So when the basic religious belief of the prohibition of the images of God and the Prophet run up against a cartoon drawing, we get the events that just happened in Paris. After a bit of digging, I now understand that the Islamic term is Aniconism. This proscription in Islam is against the depiction of any sentient living being.

As a second irony, despite our reaching for pencils and brushes, from what I have seen, most of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons are digitally produced. I don’t know about you, but whenever I see any drawing, say the cover of the New Yorker, I always try to surmise how much of it was digitally drawn, rather than analogue.

In yesterday’s post, I commented on the power of the analogue sketch. I guess in a roundabout way, this power is aptly demonstrated by the Charlie Hebdo events.