Graphite: Animated Traces
To celebrate the publication of Graphite: Animated Traces (2024), artists and drawing enthusiasts were invited to join a book launch event at the Libby Leshgold Gallery (February 5th, 2025). This launch included a brief introduction by author Alla Gadassik, as well as a drawing session devoted to graphite led by artist and educator Vjeko Sager. Sager facilitates the Drawing Room, a drawing club dedicated to nurturing and promoting drawing culture at Emily Carr University.
The book is currently available for purchase at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and READ bookstore. See additional resources below.
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Following introductory remarks by author Alla Gadassik, artist and art educator Vjeko Sager led workshop attendees in drawing prompts inspired by the book’s key themes.
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The drawing session prompts followed the book in considering graphite as a tactile, shapeshifting, and ephemeral medium.
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The workshop embraced many different forms of graphite, from various pencils and crayons, to powders and tracing papers
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The book makes a connection between graphite’s openness to erasure and the ephemerality of animation. Participants explored smudging, erasure, and acceptance of the impermanence of mark-making.
Graphite: Animated Traces profiles the material and cultural history of graphite as a creative medium, with close attention to its important role in contemporary art and animation. The book teases out the medium’s temperament and significance by turning to the unfolding and provisional status of the drawn moving image, considering graphite as a medium of emergent thought, contemplation, tender intimacy and impermanence. What ways of knowing does graphite enable as a drawing medium? How does animating with graphite – making moving images through extended and repetitive acts of drawing – allow us to understand the world differently?
Responding with vivid analysis of pencil drawings by celebrated artists such as Georges Seurat, Vija Celmins, Park Seo-Bo and Jasper Johns, as well as animated films by Amy Kravitz, Ryo Orikasa, Alexandra Ramires and ten other artists, Graphite: Animated Traces offers a richly detailed portrait of an everyday material we often take for granted.
Author Alla Gadassik (left) gave a brief introductory talk to the book. Artist Mia Milardo (right), whose illustration is included in the book, was in attendance.
New Zealand or Australia
The book is currently available for purchase at the Govett-Brewster Gallery Shop.
buy it here
Canada and International
For buyers in Canada and internationally, the book is available at READ Books.
buy it here
