2023: The Year in Colours

( with Hexcodes )

"O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet." - Saint Augustine

Happy New Year’s Eve. If you are feeling in a festive mood maybe you would like to read about disco balls and New York and sparkles. If, like me you are more in a reminiscent mood read on. I have to admit that the last week or so hasn’t been very externally productive. I have mostly been doing a lot of sleeping in betwixmas and don’t really feel like partying or trying to plan or even think about 2024. Sometimes I wish I could be more like Werner Herzog and just keep barrelling forward into the future. But instead I look back. My first newsletter was about crab apple blossoms stolen at night from a park to make pink ink for Yuri Shimojo, an artist who was to become a most important collaborator and incomparable friend in my life. Since that first newsletter to you, I have written 150 more, which together form a kind of alternative spectrum. All the colours peculiar to the moments and feelings and memories I have passed through. Or I should say passed through with you. I have not been alone. There are about six thousand of you reading now and thinking and believing in natural colour. And together you have collectively picked your favourites. Here in descending order is a top ten list of the most read letters from The Colour in 2023. But maybe you have a different favourite. I am taking suggestions for next year, but not quite yet.—JL

10. Collecting Moonlight

This newsletter started with trying to find the name of the colour of the monarch butterfly caterpillar chrysalis, the colour of the inside of a cabbage, the colour Nyanza Green, a silvery, creamy, glowing green so pale that it is almost white, an ungraspable, almost unexplainable colour maybe best called simply, moonlight.

9. November's Gall

When Oak and Iron meet a true story of an overwintering wasp that for a thousand years of writing history turned the world to black.

8. Rose Ink Three Ways

This was a three-part series. It started with the incredible colours in a copper-flecked wild rose leaf in the rain across the street from me.

7. Brambles

What happened when a coven of artists drank red wine late into a summers night at the edge hill covered in blackberries at the edge of a lake.

6. The Asphaltic Lake

A pitchy brownish black as old as time involving the LaBrea Tar Pits and a gift from a friend that let me get sticky.

5. A Souvenir

I find an invisible oceanic message in a bottle while cleaning my studio which makes me think of my sisters out West makes me realize that ink is more than just matter.

4. A Golden Hill

Ingredients for a fall day. The same golden hill like a portal in the midst of the city that I travelled with New York Times photographer, Chloë Ellingson, and writer, Alec Scott that made the essence the essence of fall.

3. Silky

From the strongest thinnest paper to silkworm to the greyish stains on sidewalks, Mulberries are incredible plants. Also with a recipe for play dough!

2. Bubbles

This letter to you was pure, slightly weird summer. Play, lightness, childhood, floating plus some bubble-based ink experiments.

1. The First Day of Your Real Job

This was a letter about how I found my way to becoming an Ink Maker with a brief mention of Calamine lotion which is an incredible colour and texture as a weird art supply. Even if you don’t read this one all the way through, be sure to skip down to the comments. There are so many interesting paths that people have taken toward art, craft, natural colour, and self-discovery. So many versions of what your real job is. I hope you will continue to add to this one. And that the feeling of a kind of communal laboratory for talking about place-based colour can continue to come to life in the new year with all of you helps.