Charcoal's Microbial Forests

When charcoal crumbles and splinters in an artist’s hands, it serves as a reminder of its past life as a tree. This paper focuses on artists who called themselves fusainists, after the tree from which artists’ charcoal was made. I trace the links between charcoal drawing, which enjoyed a brief transatlantic renaissance in the mid nineteenth century, and industrial charcoal, which in the same period powered steam engines and smelting furnaces. Charcoal skirts visibility, disappearing and returning to dust unless treated with chemical fixatives. Once introduced in the 1840s, the fusainists could preserve their large-scale charcoal landscapes—pictures of forests made from the charred remains of the woodland itself. Such pictured forests were once adjacent to vaster groves cut to fuel the industrial revolution. To investigate the connection between aesthetic and combustible forms of carbon, I consider artworks as microbial objects beyond the scale of perception. The brief rise of charcoal drawing coincided with rising concerns about the permanence of artworks at a molecular level--concerns that once prompted Albert Bierstadt to lament the growth of "vegetable life” on his canvases. Charcoal landscapes are unique in that they share the microbiome of the land they represent. The artistic tools of the fusainists included yeasty bread and the pith of tinder mushrooms, a fungus sourced from downed logs. In other words, their efforts mimicked the ecological forces at work in the environments they rendered. Charcoal landscapes not only depicted, but were, wooded ecosystems: microbial meditations on cycles of fire, decay, and regrowth.