Going Clear

Part I: White Light

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Undated.

Light. I know not a single word fine enough for Light. Its currents pour, but it is a heavy material word not applicable to holy, beamless, bodiless, inaudible floods of Light.

—Exerpted from John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir

It’s always a bit of contrast returning to Toronto from the Hawaiian tree farm I try to go to most years, the place being such food for all the senses. And I know I can’t ask you sympathize with me but still, this year, in my part of the world, it’s been a long grey winter. January broke records with its 27 days of cloud cover, and according to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, my little patch of the country saw its darkest winter in 80 years. Since I have been back, the city has seemed barely awake and mostly under one single grey cloud. All this to say I have been noticing the the colourlessness of this between-the-seasons time.

I have also been talking to Dr. Bulb whose non pareils work I got to talk to him about in a fascinating conversation we had a few months ago. He is a specialist in glasswork and I thought maybe before we get into his wizardry that I could write a bit about why glass feels like one of the significant ingredients of ink. I thought I could make the argument for clear as a colour. The uncomplicated, unmediated invisible energy straight from the sun generally called white is maybe better described as clear. What is the un-colour called clear and how might it be used in ink making? The science itself seems almost magical. Radiation races invisibly from the sun in particles/waves hitting the various structures and chemistries of ink-making materials which by absorbing and reflecting select wavelengths define what we see as colours. So in this way, clear light is a fundamental building block of everything the natural ink maker does. I have been thinking about and collecting and experimenting with water for a long time, and air too should not be ignored as a significant non-coloured ingredient in the ink-making process.

But today in this brief window of clarity, in this in-between season, I am thinking of glass.

I think for me glass is fascinating because it is the holder of most of my experiments. It’s a nothing that creates the form of the something that goes inside it. It’s a window into the arena where the co-mingling happens. Glass is sturdy, non-reactive, easy to clean, does not off-gas or change the substances that it contains. I started using glass funnels and beakers, vials, flasks and of course, inkwells, because I just liked the look of lab glass, but I have come to understand glass is its own sort of magic. Next week we get into Dr. Bulb, who among other things once made all the lab glass for the set of Black Panther II.

This week a visual poem to glass and going clear. I can’t help but start with the cryptic last page of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives:

The photo essay continues for Colour Lab subscribers below: Please do join the conversation. Do you have thoughts about clarity? Late winter light? A favourite glass container? Advice for cleaning beakers? Let us know. Also, I hope you might consider becoming a paying member to support the photo research, inspirational rabbit holes, and participation in what is slowly becoming a revolution in plant-people relations and experimental colour alternative to the algorithm. Yours, Jason