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.
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…
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