Graphite: Animated Traces

To celebrate the publishing of Graphite: Animated Traces (2024), artists and enthusiasts alike were invited to join a book launch event at the Libby Leshgold Gallery on February 5th, 2025. This launch included a brief introduction by author Alla Gadassik, as well as a drawing session devoted to graphite with artist and educator Vjeko Sager, who 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.

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.