Apology for Absence
this week
Dear Readers I love the practice of writing you once a week about colour and foraging and ink. I so appreciate everyone who reads and subscribes and those of you who have joined The Colour Lab as paying members. I love thinking up what to talk about next and researching and experimenting and explaining and conveying my excitement in words and pictures. I love imagining you reading this. Imagining you around the world, in the woods, in cities, at work in the morning with a cup of milky tea. But every once in a while, like this week and I think this is only the second time or maybe third in the last 2 years I feel like I have overextended myself. Being the owner and only employee of The Toronto Ink Company of sometimes need to recover from my own excitements. I am still writing up my interview with Dylan Kehde Roelofs aka Doctor Bulb and I want to get it right. I am still transcribing his words that I wrote on my notes app as fast as I could while we were talking. Here are a few choice quotes:
“what did the plant need to say to the sun?”
“the torah is written in White Fire and Black Fire (a fire so pure it doesn’t give off light)”
“A puddle is just a small ocean. A bottle is a little world. The glass is boundary, blank canvass immediately divided, supporting the division in way that refers to light”
“the vitreous state is a peculiarity of physics it sighs and relaxes in the flame everything else explodes or bursts into flame.”
I want to get it right not just because he is so interesting and I want you to see the poetry, the humour, the skill, the weirdness and the beauty of his work but also because talking to Dylan felt like a sort of course of education? of medicine? that continues to work its questions inside me. What is the relationship between container and contained? What is it about a little glass bottle of ink that can in the right hands become a whole world? What does a bottle of ink mean to me? I asked him for some accompanying images for my post and he sent me these enigmatic pictures. I hope you will consider this a kind of trailer for my next letter to you which might have to wait until Friday while I get caught up to myself. send word of what you are up to or feeling colour-wise this week in the comments.
—Jason
A weekly newsletter is a huge commitment. I say never worry. This is more timely anyway!
I’ve always viewed the body as a container for the spirit and found the boundary of it to be quite odd and disconcerting.
Kind of like ink in a glass jar I guess.
I look forward to more, meanwhile I will ponder what the plant said to the sun.
I’m so intrigued so take your time….