Making Cutting-Edge Art with Ballpoint Pens

Renato Orara, Untitled 2011-05, 2011, ballpoint pen on paper.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO., NEW YORK

Last August, Toyin Odutola brought a stack of ballpoint pens and markers into the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, sat down, and drew a picture. A large screen projected her progress as she filled the paper with thousands of marks. Museumgoers circled around her and asked her questions. “One lady was like, ‘Is that pen? I don’t believe it!’” Odutola recalls. “I was drawing, and she took the pen out of my hand and looked at it.”

To shut out these kinds of distractions and focus on the task at hand, Odutola put on headphones and listened to dance music. Four hours after she started drawing, she was done, having produced a densely limned portrait of an Asian woman with golden hair and eyebrows, her skin composed of Odutola’s signature sinewy ballpoint lines, with blue, green, and flesh tones rising from underneath. “It was shocking that I finished, because I’d never really performed drawing,” says Odutola, who was born in Nigeria and grew up in the Bay Area and Alabama. “It’s normally a very solitary act within my studio.”

Russell Crotty, Watch the Dolphins Play, 2007, ballpoint pen and watercolor on paper on a fiberglass sphere.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND CRG GALLERY, NEW YORK

Fortunately for Odutola, she has been in plenty of other exhibitions over the last year that haven’t required her to perform for a crowd. She had asolo show at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, where she’s now based, and her ballpoint drawings have made appearances at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Menil Collection in Houston, and theChinese Cultural Center of San Francisco and are now at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn (through January 19).

She was also included in “Ballpoint Pen Drawing Since 1950” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, which placed the 28-year-old Odutola at the tail end of a succession of creators who have embraced the lowly ballpoint pen as a serious tool for making art. The others in the show were Alberto Giacometti, Alighiero Boetti, Il Lee, Jan Fabre, Martin Kippenberger, Bill Adams, Joanne Greenbaum, Russell Crotty, Rita Ackermann, and Dawn Clements. But curator Richard Klein traces the genesis of ballpoint art back to Argentina in the 1940s.

The ballpoint pen was first patented in 1888 as a device for jotting on leather. It wasn’t developed as a writing tool until 50 years later, when the Hungarian journalist László Bíró had the idea of putting fast-drying newspaper ink into a pen with a tiny ball at the tip that would allow the ink to flow evenly. Then came World War II, and Bíró escaped to Argentina in 1941, taking his invention with him. Manufacture of the pens began in Buenos Aires soon afterward.

Lucio Fontana also moved to Argentina in the early ’40s. He was born in that country in 1899 but spent a large part of his life in Italy, where he had come under the influence of the Futurists and shared their obsession with cutting-edge technology. “Fontana was the first artist to use ballpoint pen, in 1946,” Klein says. “The pen was heavily promoted in Argentina, and I’m sure it’s no coincidence that he was using ballpoint pen in the same place where Bíró had invented it.” Those early ballpoint sketches reflect Fontana’s interest in merging art, science, and technology through his Spatialist movement. In one drawing, Fontana doodled a spiraling funnel filled with swirling orbs, as if he were testing the continuous-flow quality of the new pen.

Soon, the ballpoint spread to Europe and the United States, thanks in large part to the clear-plasticBic Cristal. It was cheap, portable, and reliable, and it didn’t smudge or blot as much as fountain pens did. It also produced uniform lines, making it a quintessentially modernist tool. Throughout the ’50s and ’60s, Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, Agnes Martin, Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, Yayoi Kusama, John Cage, Sigmar Polke, Louise Bourgeois, and many other artists sketched with ballpoint pen. Cy Twombly incorporated it into his doodle-and-text works, and “the Fluxus artists used all sorts of office materials, including ballpoint pens, tape, stamps, and typewriters,” says Scott Gerson, associate conservator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Perhaps the first person to use the ballpoint as the primary medium in a major work of art was Alighiero Boetti. Starting in the early ’70s, the Italian artist employed dozens of helpers to fill sheets of paper with solid fields of black, blue, or red ink. His 1973 piece in the Aldrich show consisted of eleven such panels, all with “ONONIMO”—a wordplay on the Italian terms for anonymous, homonymous, and eponymous—etched from white negative space at the top. “The blue in this work is really extraordinary,” says Klein. “The pieces are really well preserved. Other Boettis were not—they are faded.”

Which brings up the biggest problem with ballpoint ink: preservation. “Early ballpoint-pen ink, especially the blue, would fade if you exposed it to the light. It’s not permanent,” Klein says. “That’s because most of the inks are dye-based colorants, which are susceptible to color-shift or fading,” says Gerson. Today, many professional artists buy pens containing archival inks, but “really, the only reliable thing is to keep it out of the light,” Gerson adds.

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Joo Lee Kang, Bouquet of Nature #5, 2012, ballpoint pen on paper.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALLERY NAGA, BOSTON