There is a place on a hillside that has everything. Paths meander back into the underbrush past Queen Anne’s Lace, a tall beer can beside a makeshift campfire with ashes of that fire the blackened swirls of ancient oak bark. The bigger path, lined with goldenrod gone seedy silver under some fallen trees and along the hillside to a black walnut tree. A few electric green spheres up in the high branches and plenty on the ground going brown and speckled in the dirt. The dirt smells good. Acorns. Oaks. Buckthorn ripening black-purple deeper in the thicket, and then hanging from the trees in looping garlands, the vines, the tendrils, the yellowing leaves, and here and there in bunches, perfect, beaded and purple, the wild grapes staining your fingers. First velvety red, and then deeper into regal purple intensified pigment jewel-toned and slow and delicious. Long black beetles glisten with a greenish sheen echoing the hundreds of black birds startled into a calligraphic spray across a blue sky from the soft brushy pines. Higher up, a turkey vulture that colour of the light from the sky making the feathers of its wingspan translucent blue bronze from the high calm dome of the sky above all of this. And then back down, low at earth level, the old dried shells of acorns leftover from some squirrel feast the year before mixed in with the bleached-out grasses and lobed leaves in perfect round meanders, and the new acorns yellow and fresh with rings of tannins on the underside of their caps. The way the sun comes out for a moment and finds its way to a patch down through the canopy of the big ancient twisted oak sitting there on the ground searching the place where the arms of its roots plunge down into the cool earth. And there among the shells and dirt and grasses and leaves and vines, in a tiny spotlight of light, something strange, almost monstrous, a bug a larva a crablike form its front arms almost like a T-rex or praying mantis, two bulges for eyes. But it’s not alive, it is just the shell or a past of some live thing. A cicada that spent the last 7 years sleeping only to wake and crawl out of its own skin and look for love and electrical singing somewhere high above in the old oak. But here, beside the trunk, its bark like elephant hide, old and warm and stable, it’s the empty husk that makes all the other colours and textures and feelings disappear for a moment while the thing glints, and for a moment, you and the carapace are utterly alone. The way the light hits this once alive thing is metal. Is a Roman breastplate. Is pure glittering gold. Is fall. —JL
The notebook I took with me yesterday.
In the Colour Lab this week a collection of tests on paper from the materials of that place and some art that feels inspired by fall gold. And a question for you: where is your gold? Or maybe a better question, where in this season, is your hill?
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