My Porto-pencil

Three Mallards
01-28-13
graphite

This drawing was made with my "Porto-pencil". It was given to me by Paula C. a friend from Porto, Portugal. This pencil is a tourist number. It's big and black with a kind of art-deco illustration of Porto's skyline wrapped around its barrel. It's big and fat and filled with lots of hard indifferent graphite. But it's from Paula and I know special drawings will come out of it.

From Paula's photos and blog posts, I imagine that it's always warm in Porto and moist sea breezes perpetually tangle my hair. The city — is it made of butter? — rises on the hills above the ocean and the harbor-side promenades. I'd like to visit Porto and Lisbon. Paula would show me the lighthouses.

But to draw with my Porto-pencil, in Massachusetts in the middle of winter, I have to hold it in my gloved hand and I hold it at the far end. The pencil's tip is far away herding the bits of my vision into a fidgety but recognizable drawing of ice and snow, ducks, the river's current and the tangled branches of bushes.

It's nice to think of my pen pal Paula here in my winter. We both love birds and the freight of symbols they carry so effortlessly. I imagine that the Porto-pencil is especially good at drawing birds. We'll see about that.

Hi Paula. Muito obrigado, gratissimo!