Nyanza
I wanted to give you something for the harvest full supermoon tonight. A moonlight colour. And I found Nyanza green a palest lunar green like the inside of a cabbage. Like a monarch butterfly caterpillar chrysalis. And the colour seemed perfect but the word lead me to a cancerous dye factory in Ashland Massachusetts set up a Prussian immigrant who thought he was referencing Lake Victoria in Bantu but was only repeating a misunderstood colonial map of Africa and so the colour seemed to have a kind of chemical glow that didn’t feel right and I thought of another moon for you.
Borax
It was a couple of years back on an easter long weekend I was in California with Brian, the director and Nick, the cinematographer we didn’t have the go ahead yet for The Colour of Ink but our funders gave a proof of concept budget to test out the idea of a documentary about ink and The Director was convinced it should be in the desert and I said I don’t know how much ink we are going to find in the desert but I’d been to Death Valley a few times and always wanted to find a source for pure borax. Borax is a natural boron-based salt formed in ancient lakebeds and I use it to break down flakes of shellac so that they work with water and the most common brand has a picture of mules in a wagon train crossing Death Valley. We didn't have that much money and we just had an easter long weekend to spend it, and my favourite place to stay in Death Valley was booked, but Cynthia who has the B and B there also had an airstream on the edge of the park. Brian had spent all day sick in the airstream and by the time Nick and I got back, he looked like he had been baking in there but the flu passed and the three of us found some wild borax near an abandoned mine in a windstorm (a scene that never made it into film).
It was hunting for another source borax in the foothills around Tecopa hot springs that we ended up stopping collecting yellow ditch flowers which I think were rabbitbush but might have been some other scrubby desert flower, plus some brilliant pink flowers from a cactus that I kept pricking my fingers on. That night back in the airstream I made pasta and Brian made frozen margaritas and Nick started disassembling his kit and we had to get up early to fly back and I realized that I might not be able to take ziplock bags of cactus flowers and rabbit bush blossom over the border and I’d have much better luck exporting some small intensified bottles of ink. I set up my camping stove and vials and alcohol and filters on the rolling BBQ cart beside the trailers and starting grinding and stirring and, boiling and sieving and at some point Nick noticed what I was doing and reassembled his cameras and lenses and opened the window of the airstream and caught the bubbling steaming desert ink making. The cooking progressed and Nick got in closer and at first it was just the light from the BBQ flame on my work in the murky dark and then a spotlight slowly came onto the scene and we looked up and it was the moon as big and round as a plate making ink with me. Brian put all the footage together and the funders loved it and the documentary got the green light.
Snails
It was the next year (or was it two years later?) I learned at a dinner party about the purpula snail tucked into the rocky shoreline north of Huatulco. These snails make a rich purple colour related to the famous murex snail that dyed the hem of Roman togas. But to make this traditional Mexican dye, the snails were milked and put back onto the rocks rather than destroyed. The hidden Oaxacan coastline were they live is protected. Only a handful of Mixtec artisans are authorized to harvest the colour. And the milking can only happen durring the full moons of spring. So again we found ourselves jumping on a plane for an Easter weekend following our instincts and the moon. There was just the faintest cycle of a moon in the sky at dawn when we arrived by boat at the remote stretch of beach where Habacuc Avendano harvests the purple colour. Habacuc and his son leaped around on the rocks digging in crevices with his stick every once in a while suddenly plunging his hand into a crack in a rock, pulling out a snail sort of tickling its underside until it expelled a colourless liquid onto a skein of white cotton he had wrapped around his arm and then gently placing the snail back where he found it and giving it a little splash of saltwater. Habacuc had a way of instinctively dodging the waves while the camera and I tried to follow him. The sun came up hot in the sky and we ate amaranth snacks under a tree with the drone operator and translator and somehow he knew just when a big wave was coming in. He even knew when we had to get back into the boat. I didn’t see anything different about the ocean but by the time we loaded our gear and got back into the boat the tides had rolled in and the beach completely disappeared and the sharp rocks and the snails and everything was deep underwater and somewhere way up in the blue sky, the invisiable moon was doing its work.
A Moodboard of moons
After I wrote these stories I found a few images and writings for you about the moon which I saved for members of the Colour Lab.
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