Golden
Ode to the Toronto ink attic studio
“If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” (Gaston Bachelard)
I have moved. And I hate moving. All the bits and pieces that belong in no box. The up and down stairs. The feeling that you are an ant and that nothing is organized and that all the things you have kept over the years are basically just junk and yet you can’t throw them out because inside one of the boxes there is a smaller box that has been mislabeled but that has a scrap of paper with a name and an address and a number that might create the tiny swerve that will lead to the thing that you most need in your life. Or not. Well anyway, The Toronto Ink Company Attic Studio is no more. 14 years ago I lovingly scraped linoleum tiles and their weird cardboardy grey underglue off the floors to reveal beautiful knotty pine floor boards that I sanded and then rubbed with something called Danish oil until it looked it took on a what actually can be described as a Danish glow and then I painted all the walls and ceiling white and bought an old sky-blue steel filing cabinet from guy who was about to strip all the paint off to make it stainless steel again and lugged it upstairs to go with the medical trolley and the big glass bottles and all the rest. It was my room for everything creative from scheming to become the Creative Director of the City of Toronto to gluing bits of leaves to old 16 mm film sent to me a beautiful woman in a norm-core band, to setting a salt-encrusted piece of dirt on fire to test for Borax to designing labels and bottling ink. There was a little bottle of Eve’s Klein blue with a tiny cork on the window sill sent to me by Heidi Gustafson from the deep woods surrounded by volcanos where she lives and half of a litre of tap water from Thunder Bay. Packing up I kept bumping into these past lives. By the end there were stains on the floors and bottles of seeds too old to be regrown and manuscripts and recipes and a box of the Korean translation of my first book and inks that began greenish now dried to a crackling mahogany at the bottom of a mason jar. The studio became a place cluttered with old ideas and experiments and lines of inquiry and honestly it felt nice to throw stuff away or archive work into boxes and its probably time to move on and work in a cleaner more future-oriented space anyway. But still, its a death. And a death needs an Ode.
I remember one day in particular I was discovering something yellow in a erlenmeyer flask— something involving crystals with a brown sugary scent from highly alkalized buckthorn berries and the colour was warm and crystals were forming and I was swirling the potential ink and it was becoming a green-gold and I looked outside my window and the whole city was swirling with a sudden snowstorm and I saw in one perfect moment that I was contained in a city itself inside the snow globe of the afternoon and in my hands was a second swirling and my whole studio-attic was part of this mixture: a wheel inside a wheel inside a wheel and I was the experiment and the transforming with inside and outside all at the same time. And for that one moment I loved my studio. And for that one moment I had discovered some real secret: an aloneness that was at the same time was pure connection. It was in a word, gold. And so I say goodbye to the golden studio and hello to whatever will be next.
Lots more colour news next week. There is a lot going on.
Thank you. I sell many copies of your delightful book in my bookstore here in New Zealand. Today, my husband and I formulated our first pigment from our grapevine. Looking forward to adding gum Arabic and water soon. Love all your Instagram posts, too. Thank you for colouring my world.
SCRUMPTIOUSLY,DEEELUSCIOUS ! Reminds me of Mana’s Mother, Florence Link, or “Nana” to me....a “Proper Wife,Mother,Merchant and Grandmother who had a home outside of Windsor,where Great Lake’s Freighters plied their trade,carrying, iron,steel,copper,prairie wheat,and other grains harvested from the Plaines,milled in huge mills, then meshed and ran through giant sleeves and towers, where boxcars gathered,while the freshly gritted flours spun down spouts and filled them for transit. From around 4 until maybe 14 I took delight in this completely Different sensuous array than in our homes and yards in Detroit.
Freshly hung laundry snapped and sparkled in the breeze, Nana’s apple sauce bowl ( a brownish yellow clay pottery,embroidered with small red apples painted around its rim) filled with warm mashed apples,cinnamon,just the Right amount of powdered clove and an almost blonde,very soft brown sugar with a perfect touch of butter,while Grandaddy’s garage housed his old Desoto car it’s indigo paint turning rainbowish on the hood and wheel skirts from driving the Midwestern,Windsor Road salt streets. There was his workbench and tool rack,all his tools being hand powered and operated from saws to hammers to drills and brace and bits.
It’s cardboard covered floor would take in and absorb the odd oil leak or small spill.
Some special days he would pull out his rods,net and tackle box and we would sit together out on the concrete breakwater. Granddaddy Link didn’t talk a lot but he did Laugh and liked to “ pull my leg “
The chop of the waves,passing freighters,speed,row boats,yachts and small craft passing by
were a delight !
Convinced that ‘ Canada’ tasted,smelled,looked and Felt Different than Detroit,Michigan “ I Know,with a certainty that I was Correct.
Many of those differences are dissipating,disappearing,or Gone now except in memories! And,that’s Fine. “Row,row,Row your boat,gently down the Stream....Merrily,Merrily,Merrily,Merrily. Life is But a Dream !