A Flower with Love

The Fleeting Colours of Spring Blossoms (and a few tips)

A picture of my mother pregnant with my younger sister Leah on the dock at Gould Lake. I was probably floating a duck decoy somewhere around the corner. I learned today that Mother’s day is called Mothering Sunday in the UK which has some weird Religious connotations but I like the idea of a verb-based holiday that talks a bit about nurture and care and a kind of tending. I hope you get to take time on the weekend to honour whatever the version of mothering that helped make you into what you are becoming.

Sometimes in workshops I recommend resisting the urge to forage colour from flowers because the job is already done. Plants soak up their surroundings, adjust their chemistry and concentrate their pigments onto the flat smooth medium of their petals eloquently communicating to the bees and butterflies and ants and people in the fleeting flower language we call beauty. Flowers are their own natural ink makers and we humans might as well stand back and admire the love letter they write every spring. All that said I have learned a few things about flower colour over the years that I would love share with the members who have joined the colour lab. For everyone else I have compiled a kind of garden of thinkings and noticing about flowers, of our human attempts to get flower language on paper or canvas or the back of an envelope because we can’t help it.

Josef Sudek (1896-1976) The Window of My Studio 1965

Jaipur Flower Market

from this New York Time’s Op ed from years ago..

Manet, Roses in a Glass Vase, 1883

The Gorgeous Nothings: Envelope Poems by Emily Dickinson

The flower alchemy of Cara Marie Piazza who is hosting summer colour school workshop with me and a few other special participants in July.

Marta Abbott cochineal, acorn cap and cyclamen ink heart on paper, 22 x 28 cm. (long-time collaborator, instigator of last week’s newsletter)

from the sketchbook of The Toronto Ink Company

BY CYNTHIA ZARIN

This morning I was walking upstairs

from the kitchen, carrying your

beautiful flowers, the flowers you

brought me last night, calla lilies

and something else, I am not

sure what to call them, white flowers,

of course you had no way of knowing

it has been years since I bought

white flowers—but now you have

and here they are again. I was carrying

your flowers and a coffee cup

and a soft yellow handbag and a book

of poems by a Chinese poet, in

which I had just read the words “come

or go but don’t just stand there

in the doorway,” as usual I was

carrying too many things, you

would have laughed if you saw me.

It seemed especially important

not to spill the coffee as I usually

do, as I turned up the stairs,

inside the whorl of the house as if

I were walking up inside the lilies.

I do not know how to hold all

the beauty and sorrow of my life.

"Flowers"  from Orbit: Poems by Cynthia Zarin

What follows are some of my finding in making ink with flowers…