In a fog

What happened last night

Josef Albers Grey Instrumentation I 1974

I’m sorry this letter is late, I’ve been in a fog.

Johanne Itten who was very interested in colour harmony talked about how the intensity of hue excites the mind and about how bright colours will conjure up their opposite on the colour wheel. So staring at a red square for a long time and then at a white wall will create a ghostly green square to balance things out for us. I always assumed that clear white light which includes all the spectrum would be the balance, but there is a colour that Itten talked about called medium grey that is a kind of calming neutral colour that our mind and eye longs to return to. You might call it fog grey. Every time I make a grey ink I think of this in-between grey like being dusted by a moth, or living inside television static, or wearing a grey flannel suit, or being immersed in the particles of a misty day after the rain to the point that the boundaries of you and your mood and the day soften and dissolve. This week I was thinking about that kind of grey more than ever.

I didn’t write you last night because I went to a book launch in a gallery for a book I designed called Utopia made by a writer I love and I wore a green foraging jacket and my old purple t-shirt and yellow bandana that I found on the side of the road up north tied around my neck like a scarf, and an old friend-boss of mine said, what are you wearing, you look pretentious. The gallery was just setting up a show of a painter who had been on a years’ long quest to visit and think about eco-utopias around the world with her small family, and in the back room there were photographs of Judy Chicago’s work with coloured smoke, and I saw many old friends and vague acquaintances and work-people, and there was a performance artist, Amber Helen Müller St. Thomas, dressed in silver high heels wearing a large tippy box with champaign flutes of water on one side and champagne on the other piled in a pyramid and guests were invited to take a glass. Every time a glass moved, the large tippy box-dress changed its balance and you could tell by their face that the whole thing was really heavy and they were a kind of living statue endurance artwork and the first couple of moments were awkward and everyone was afraid to get involved, but as soon at it was clear that the whole thing was not going to fall apart and the glasses were not going to smash on the concrete gallery floor, and more and more people joined in, it got easier to grab glasses from both sides and the artist became just a part of the scene. Or sort of. I could see that as it got easier for the audience it got harder for them because it got faster and they had to concentrate on every part of their extended body and I could see the pain in their face of trying to look like there was no pain in their face and the tensing up inside of the box of tension in their balancing which created a vibration that some people could see and other people couldn’t seem to see.

There were a lot of old friends there at this opening and everyone was asking about “my film” and the more I talked about it the more I understood that while I thought I was making a film, I was in fact being made into a film that is now owned by other people. I had to decide last night whether to cancel my flight to Europe which I didn’t have the energy for but I knew might change my whole mood or to stay home with my projects and my gloom and my middle child with a long fever or find some other way.

My old boss who said I looked pretentious often just says what is on his mind without considering it, and I almost admire him for this, and how could he know? He didn’t know I have been pretty much wearing the same set of clothes for the last two years straight, and that I needed the foraging jacket to cover the t-shirt which has a big hole under the arm, and that I was trying to dress up so that I wouldn’t feel like I was disappearing. He didn’t know that I have been feeling down since returning from New York where I felt my job in the world consolidate, and my spirit happy inside its body for the first time in a long time. He couldn’t have known that I was thinking the right outfit might make me at least look like I felt okay enough to join the group and support the people and art I believe in, and he didn’t know that I just went back on the medication or that I come from a long line of men who disappear up to their bedroom into their own cloud for weeks or years waiting for the weather to change, and that every cell in my body was calling me to join them. That I was fighting.

Sometime late in the night or early this morning the fog rolled in and its still hanging as I write this to you in pockets here and there by the lake.

Maybe the yellow scarf was a bit much. I could have worn grey.

—Jason

Acorn Cap and Carbon test inks on Japanese Paper

This newsletter was free. But I am working slowly to build a thing which could use your support. The thing is a kind of network of colour with recipes and discussions and interviews and really digging into what place and meaning-based natural colour can be. Sometimes its just getting a newsletter that I worked hard on, sometimes it will be a bit of an alternative to Twitter and Instagram and Facebook a place that feels like an exchange without Elon Musk in it. We are still building it but your support in joining helps it thrive. Also there is new Chat-thing for your phone which will allow us to exchange images and experiments. Let me know how it’s all working, I am still getting used to the technology. JL