Brick
sweat, blood, dirt + bonus handsome tennis player
happy Friday!
Last weekend I was watching Stefanos Ttsitsipas almost win against Novac Djokovic in the French open finals and I could not help but notice the ochre abstraction of sweat + french clay on his shirt which he did not change until he started losing. The french clay is in fact finely ground brick dust from a single company in Oise which you can read about here. And I was thinking about how elemental bricks are. How much I love them because they are like a heavy paint chip of place. Each brick compresses local iron rich clay into a block of colour, bakes it and multiplies it out to become the houses and factories and walls of a city. For the inkmaker its satisfying to reverse engineer this process and watch bricks disintegrate back to dirt. The Leslie spit in Toronto is a wonderland of discarded brick in every imaginable state of ruin and a great place to harvest brick red for ink. Processing bricks back into dust is kind of satisfying too and best done by rubbing two bricks together and collecting the rain of pigment on a piece of paper.
Natural orangey reds led me inexorably to Heidi Gustafson who is friend and mentor and co-organizer of an incredible pigments symposium that is on right now. Gustafson is a realm. She is a magnet for all things iron and runs the Ochre Archive/ Sanctuary in Northern Washington State and tells me that spit is the traditional binder for ochre-based pigments and looking at Ttsitsipas again theres an amplification of the connection between the body and the dirt through the colour red.
