Fugitive Colour

How an ex-girlfriend, a tomato, and a bookstore lead me to the lair of the colour wizard

Having just this week got word from my editor that the final final draft of How to Be a Colour Wizard my children’s activity book with MIT is ready for copyediting I am reminded of last years winter colour wizard residency out in the country when I was first writing the book. I went a little bit crazy and tried to make a beet soaked polenta steak and wrote this newsletter and never sent it to you. —JL

“Where ever you go, there you are.”*
—Buckeroo Bonzai

Hickory Sticks

There is a brand of gas station that I love in Toronto called “On The Run.” I’m not actually sure that this franchise is only in Toronto and also it’s not really the gas station but the convenience store attached to the gas station that is called, “On The Run.” I love the name because as if the gas station convenience store wasn’t already a sort of sleazy business where you imagine someone in a an pickup truck with big sunglasses would go to get their pack of smokes, a lottery ticket, and bag of hickory sticks for the road. They’ve added on top of the inherent adventure the suggestion that the person wolfing down the hickory sticks on the leatherette truck seat is also running from the law. I mean why not just buy a bottle of peroxide, bleach your hair white-blonde like Ponyboy from the Outsiders and start a new life? On the Run is actually a crap convenience store and they just changed their logo which used to be humorously italicized and is now something more “designed” (minimalist) and gas is crazy expensive and the food is questionable. But it was never the place that I loved, nor really the hint of illegality, it was the feeling of getting in the car and just driving out of town, being on the run in the sense that you would make a bee-line in any direction and figure out somewhere later down the road what you were doing.

The portal

I was thinking about all of this when I hit the wintery highway 410 on the way to a make-shift artist’s residency in the Loyalist territory at the east end of Lake Ontario just a few miles west of the Millhaven Maximum Security Prison. I’ll get back to fugitive colour, but first I have to tell you about this house. The house is run by Julie who is an old roommate I knew in my twenties and who is now married with two kids. I lived briefly with her and her boyfriend (not the guy she is married to now, I think he’s living out west after selling what would now be his legal business and a sometimes changing cast of other characters). This was at a moment in my life where I broke up with my fiancé (she was embarking on a second affair, I couldn’t seem to get out of my waitering job and get my act together, the breakup was the kind that makes you question the phrase whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and I was feeling that nothing made sense anymore. You might even say I was on the run from my old life and I definitely needed a new place to crash and I was welcomed into this house with the open arms of neohippies. What I remember most about Julie was one evening early on when she was in the kitchen chopping tomatoes and I noticed that she didn’t cut out the little tough part of the tomato where the stem comes out and when I asked her about it she said I feel sorry for that part of the tomato, it’s always getting thrown away and it’s not like it’s poison or anything. Julie’s sensitivity to the feelings of tomatoes and irreverence towards common kitchen beliefs became for me the gateway to a new life. I never looked back.

The Lair of the Colour Wizard

Sorry, I was supposed to tell you about this artist residency in the country. Its a big and sprawling old farmhouse with a giant oak staircase in the middle and in the deep winter its heated by a pellet stove and a woodstove although its kind of glamorously cold in many of the rooms, and I should say that all of the rooms are a different and surprising colour and full of midcentury modern’s most peculiar design cul-de-sacs. Your attention is pulled this way and that by candy-coloured children’s toys, baroque biomorphic furniture, and an extraordinarily eclectic decorating style that Julie calls psychedelic cottage core but it’s a moniker really only scratches the surface of a pool that’s something like those pools at the beginning of the Tales of Narnia. On AirBnB its called Hay Bay Hideaway but I started calling it to myself (and maybe a bit on instagram) The Lair of the Colour Wizard. I kept finding new drawers with historical plastic bowls, or a whole rainbow of little terrycloth rags, or a tea tray designed by Eames, that is if Eames had taken a bunch of magic mushrooms and then started designing. Plus there is full drum kit and an ancient electric keyboard, obscure children’s modular furniture, a record player for the 1960s Afropop on vinyl, and a working xylophone on wheels. I went there imagining a quiet place to write, away from the city and in retrospect, I wasn’t so much inspired as I was fully re-arranged.

Some photos from my time in the lair of the colour wizard.

What kids want

The house actually wasn’t easy nor exactly comfortable. At one point power in the whole Hay Bay area went out and I found myself in the basement examining a sump pump by candle light. My health hasn’t been great. And the food I brought required a lot more problem-solving than the pictures I took for instagram would suggest. Hay Bay wasn’t minimalist or a blank slate for writing in. Maybe it could be for someone: the room at the top of the stairs is quite calming with all pastel blue tones and hints of a delftware meets dreamy seafaring chic. But instead of staying in the blue room and quietly tapping away at my keyboard, I ended up taking a lot of pictures and thinking a lot about the possibilities of revved up colour for kids, and how colour and food go together. In short I became not the calm peaceful writer that I imagined myself to be or thought I should be, but instead I discovered the wild, colour-mad, science-magic-art hybrid I guess I have to admit I am becoming while writing this children’s book. When I started this book, I thought it would be a kids version of my adult book. Something soothing and natural, poetic and subtle, but, you know, for kids. Well that idea worked about as well as the idea that kids are mostly natural, poetic, and subtle.

A Bookstore

My friend Fowler, who runs a justifiably world-famous used bookstore called The Monkey’s Paw, says of his shop that its a place to find not the book you thought you were looking for but the book that you didn’t know you were looking for. I ended up approaching last week’s residency in the country a bit like that, and because I was working with the fugitive pigments of beets, I found myself thinking a lot about how to get a bright red colour out of pigments that keep shifting. The colour from beets like that of most of reddish vegetables and flowers tends to move around when you change their PH or their temperature, or you expose them to UV light. So its not long before your pure beet ink fades to pink and then brownish and then grey until finally it disappears to become an invisible ink. In workshops when people ask me about colourfastness, I offer up the poetic phrase “fugitive colour” that dyers talk about, and I mention Victoria Findlay’s concept of colour as a verb. She explains that colour is an action that is happening rather than a noun-like thing or an end-state. And then I say that if you want permanent you can always go to an art supply store where the chemical industrial colour complex has made pigments stable and permanent but dead and maybe a bit toxic. And all these things are still true. But I wonder. Is there a way to be both on the run and —if not absolutely steadfast— at least steady.

The part of the newsletter that starts to sound a bit like an ad feel free to skip this if you are a true anti-capitalist or are really mad at Netflix or have some other good excuse like that.

Is there a way to get an intense mind-blowing, non-toxic red colour from a beet that kids love and that actually sticks around? As a colour wizard I feel obligated to look into this matter and I did start to try to answer some of these questions last week in the Colour Lab but this week I want to be more direct and offer 5 tricks for stabilizing natural colour. To get this information and to see other lab members’ ideas you will have to pay $7 a month and become a full subscriber which also gets you into the lab. Or you could just gas up your car, hit the road, become a colour nomad, and find, somewhere out there, your own mix of intensity and stability and I would not judge you. JL

*The first use of this quote comes from Thomas a Kempis around 1440 AD.