Muddy
"To the one with her head out the window, drinking the rain." George Starbuck, from a dedication poem to Anne Sexton inscribed in his book titled Bone Thought
Hello. Do you remember making potions from weeds and mud stirred with sticks? Its raining today and I have been thinking muddy thoughts. Thinking about soil. About the forms that emerge from water and dirt make together the silty delta and rivulets and fluid dynamics of handmade ink on paper. I love too the murky colours the green-grey browns. The yellowy blacks. The orangey purple clay colours. The unpronounceable and overmixed puddle colours. There is something about a muddy colour that asks you to enter its world. I have spent a lot of time studying the earthy tones. And the ink company has allowed me to have an accuse to become a kind of professional mudworker. I’ve macerated inner bark fibres, fermented grasses, boiled up acorn caps and roasted chicory roots, I’ve collected cigarette butts and bedsprings and received bags of leaves in the mail. I once signed for a box containing a plastic bucket of Kansas topsoil from an DC comicbook artist looking to draw the early years of superman with a place based ink. I also spend some time a few years ago taking soil samples of construction sites and creating chromatography samples on filter paper the art being the various rates at which the pigments and chemicals in the soil moved outward from the silver-nitrate soaked filter paper to form a picture of what was going on underground. The believe in the dirt. Its kind of mess speaks on paper. I don’t mind the rain. More colour news next week! I hope you all are digging away. Send me word from the colour trenches. Toronto Ink loves comments.
This is what makes natural ink so alluring to me - the invitation to play and to stay. The invitation to allow colours their own journey. I remember camping out in a small cabin on the red shores of PEI looking out at the colours created by the earth turning again.
I manifested Roberto Bolano earlier. It may have been two hours like that and I didn’t realize it. Making me ok with the cold rain on a long weekend of a year of everyday felt like a long weekend (with some insurmountable weight that I’m finally able to move around.) I used the soil from the side garden to plant nearly invisible seeds of grey poppies. It may be too late, but I’m trying, no matter what.