Horsetail ashes
Finding a pixalated grey along the rail path
Hello friends. I know what you are thinking. Grey? Really? after last week’s muddy colours you may be considering quitting this newsletter for something brighter. But hear me out. Please read on or just look at the pictures (which include a hint of pink)
I’ve always like the way inks can kind of fall apart and come back together again. I love to stir dust into water. I love a felty pixalated grey and I think I have found my perfect ingredient for it. Ancient Ferns.
I know that fancy fountain pen ink is defined not by its texture but by its uniformity, consistency, and free-flowing intensity. I know pen ink is built for an almost invisible smoothness that lets the letter forms do the speaking. And I do delight in making a long-lasting pen ink but I am drawn to its opposite. The natural brush ink. Many of the inks I make show the stuff they are made of by holding the stuff in suspension. These inks are a kind of living experiment and I love the way they need to be shaken to be remade again. My Japanese friends (and especially Koji Kakinuma )tell me that part of the satisfaction of eastern style ink sticks is in the process: that you kind of decide how fine grained you want your ink. By rubbing stick against stone and loosing the binder with some drops of water you are making a complicated dance between the pigment and the water. Each particle is a different shape and size sculpted by the spiralling randomness of the artist’s hand. And then there is the ratio of water to siltky silty ink and all this for a painterly character that kind of hums with it own materials. Ink that sinks into the hairs of the brush and into the fibres of the paper in its own way on its own time.
Any plant matter, bone, or oil can be burned down to its carbon form ground into dust mixed with water and a binder and if not really carefully worked and reworked will form a kind of gritty natural ink. But I have found that there is something about the carbonized ashes of horsetails mixed with a lot of gum arabic and water that makes the most beautiful complicated grey. Its soft and prickly at the same time and it comes out a little differently everytime. I collect the horsetails along the railway tracks when they are dried in the winter or fall.
I also really want to talk about the prehistoric roots of the horsetail, their connection to metals in the soil, the railpath project I did a few years ago, how you can use them to make marks and a million other thoughts about this magical plant but I suppose you can do your own research. And to be honest I am never going to beat Oliver Sacks. Plus its Friday.
Still reading on Reckitt's Blue and how it made it's way to Canada - Qc-Labrador peninsula as ultramarine blue paint.
ANALYSIS OF THE PAINTS ON A SELECTION OF NASKAPI ARTIFACTS IN ETHNOGRAPHIC COLLECTIONS Elizabeth A. Moffatt, P. Jane Sirois and Judi Miller
excerpt from abstract & article:
“ During the nineteenth century, the Naskapi palette consisted of pigments likely to be of local origin, for example haematite, yellow ochre and green copper salts of fatty acids, as well as pigments acquired through trade, including vermilion, vermilion-red lead mixtures and Prussian blue. By the early part of the twentieth century, ultramarine blue, which could be obtained from the laundry bluing, Reckitt's blue, was the preferred blue pigment”
“The Naskapi were an Algonkian-speaking people who inhabited the Quebec-Labrador peninsula [1, 2]. Their territory, which encompassed about 1,295,000 square kilometres, was an isolated region with a harsh climate. It spanned an area northward from the St Lawrence River to Ungava Bay, and eastward from James Bay and Hudson Bay to the Atlantic Ocean. The Naskapi were nomadic and lived by fish- ing and hunting caribou. Prior to European contact, the tribe consisted of fewer than 4000 people. The present day Naskapi are known as the Innu.”
Hi there,
Today I read your book 'Make Ink' and now I'm reading texts from your Archive. Again here: Oliver Sacks (and the Horsetails - I read that in the book too, I have and have read almost all Olivers Sacks’s book, such a bright neurologist, such a bread knowledge and interest outside his own field of work, that’s how I like people, Oliver Sacks, a great example, a humble person, brilliant thinker and writer, beautiful Human)...
I've been reading and searching and what not about laundry blue for about a whole week ever since I saw your fingers with the cube of Reckitt's blue... and discovered that here in Belgium we had The St. Amands Bleu D'Outremer factory last century, with their Paon Bleu (blue peacock). Some guy wrote a whole essay about it (in Dutch) which I read. And while a link in your text directed to many kinds of bluing (and images and from there a place where I even maybe could buy this Belgian 'poppetje blauw' (blue dolly) - (Sorry, I'm not a native English speaker/writer/painter/whatever so I'm writing as it comes) - it was surprisingly easy for me to find sellers of Reckitt's blue cubes and I wanted to share this with you in case you were looking for more I could get some more and send it as a contribution. (I saw the artist with the blue eyed dog – I apologise for not remembering her name but I saw her Instagram with this – seemed to me - ‘infinite blue line’ with accompanying text… and I don’t know if 1+1=2 (if this could be the Reckitt’s blue that ended up in NY)… oh, oh… I’ve been reading and digging so much. There’s also a lot of history or stories told about this blue, the fact it’s still available in The Netherlands is (as far as I could find out) because of the habits / rituals that are still alive in part from the big community from people from Suriname & De Nederlandse Antillen (or descendents from those places – I hope this is somewhat clear what I’m writing) who live in the Netherlands. They too have ‘the Evil Eye’ , the Mallojo, they call it the Ogr’ai – in Sranan Tongo (which is a creole language – tongo – tongue (etymology from Ogr’Ai – contraction from Ogri and Ai should not be too difficult: Ogri < ogre (French -> English) = ogre, as in Shrek: bad, ugly etc. and Ai < eye / sounds like ‘eye’ - very comparable with mallojo – mal / bad – ojo/eye)
Especially the very vulnerable are protected, babies get bluing behind their ears, on their buttocks, well easier than paraphrasing the text, here is ‘a’ link with the text of relevance: https://thingsthattalk.net/en/t/ttt:TuwpTx/stories/sarpusu-and-blauwsel-textile-and-textile-bleachers-as-spiritual-medicine/blauwsel
“The bracelet is not the only way to shield a baby from the evil eye. Another way is by using blauwsel. When I asked my fully Dutch grandfather last week what he still knew about blauwsel, the first thing he asked me was why I even wanted to know that – it has long since been outdated , or so he said. He was willing to tell me what he still knew, though. Blauwsel, he told me, is the name of a whitener used for textile. His own father used to sell it in the textile store he owned. The blue-ish powder was able to correct the yellow hue that worn-out white textile may have, returning it to its original crisp white color. But he emphasized once again that these compressed blocks of blue powder are now outdated. However, this is not the case in Suriname.
In the Surinamese community, blauwsel still plays an important role in the protection against ogri ai. There are several ways to protect a baby from the evil eye using blauwsel. One way is to bathe the baby in water in which a block of the powder has dissolved. You can also dip a finger in water and then rub it into the powder, as this creates a sort of creamy paint-like substance, which can then be smeared behind the ears of the child, on its feet, above its bum or on its forehead. Once this has been done, the baby is ready to face anyone who comes to visit, even if they look at the baby with envy because of its beauty.
Pregnant women can protect themselves by washing their bellies with blauwsel, or they can paint a cross on their belly to protect themselves and the unborn child from the evil eye. They usually do this if they experience a lot of morning sickness or if the unborn child is restlessly kicking in the belly.
Not only pregnant women and babies can be protected from the evil eye through bathing in blauwsel. It is tradition to have a wasi (ritual herbal bath) on the last day of the year. This herbal bath is performed with Swit’ watra (‘sweet water’, as it usually smells of sweet perfumes, herbs and flowers). One of the components of this sweet water is blauwsel. This bath will cleanse a person spiritually, give renewed energy, and protect from the evil eye.
So, although my grandfather was right that blauwsel is not as common to wash clothes as it used to be, it is still used for rituals of cleaning and washing.”
I will stop now.
I’m not yet an ink maker. I’m a paintmaker in my head (but not for real yet, although I have all the ingredients here)
I’ve been drawing and painting as long as I can remember (and experimenting with words but sadly in Flemish, so not really a world language – and I so recognised something I read in the conversation between you and Michael Ondaatje: when I was writing, as in a trance but in the same moment as lucid as one could ever be, I now look back at my writings, I still see them as my best writing ever but I feel amused, don’t even recognise that I wrote those texts, I don’t understand them and when I read them I can see a whole new tableau, I have to. Well. No, this is nothing I read in your book, this probably is an associative thought that came up.
Oké. Enough.
Thank you for your writings. Thank you for the laundry bluing (my sister who is now in Montreal, will look in her closets if she still has some, I’ve been talking colour to everybody the whole time, yellow too, but blue has always been my colour....) Thank you.
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