Part II: Rockface

a blue between worlds

“For me, beauty is not at all about looking good. Beauty is actually about looking like yourself.”—ALOK Vaid-Menon

A package

A grainy cumulus of soft stone, dirty grey on the outside and an almost pulsing grey-blue on the inside, came to me via post in a small cardboard box with a sprig of cedar and a sepia-toned photograph of a dream, wrapped in a piece of paper that had my own writing on it. It fit in my palm and left a faint blue smudge wherever it touched, and it warmed in my hand like something growing. I had held this rock once before, years ago, in a cabin in the woods in northern Washington at the end of a chain of volcanoes at Heidi Gustafson’s Ochre sanctuary. It lay on the palm of my hand lit like a gem by the light coming through the window of my dining room in the film I am working on with the NFB. After its documentary cameo, it came with me to New York and was trapped with me in the Covid hotel in Queen’s where I introduced it as a significant object in my online workshop with the New York Botanical Gardens, and it joined a Zoom call with important Hollywood executive who has a vision of rocks as sensors. Before all this, the rock had grown below ground like coral fingers not yet blued by oxygen, and had worked with sea and salt and tides and crumblings to loosen itself from its birthplace above the sandy Washington coast on a grey day. And then the rock moved the way rocks move to let itself be known to Heidi, who was working on a very particular rock medicine: a rock medicine that united decay and growth in a beautiful way. And because I was holding not just a rock with a backstory, but also a moving being of colour and purpose, it didn’t seem right for it to just sit there on shelf. I figured I should send the rock back to Heidi—after all she had found it. She is a wise magnet for and translator of all things ochre, and maybe the rock was still longing for that grey rainy day on the beach. So I emailed Heidi about how to send it back. “Ahhh” she wrote, “ I tell you what, let the vivianite stay and tell you what / where / when to do.”

A blue between worlds

I was happy to just hold this rock in my hand every once in a while and do a little bit of research which is how I learned that the blue tones of vivianite were found growing in the bones of Ötzi (a fascinating tattooed naturally mummified man that emerged from an glacier in the alps in the 90s); in the jungle-submerged remains of Vietnam soldiers killed in a plane crash(!); and in other boggy environments of Northern Europe that allow for a very particular dance of phosphate iron and water. I learned that vivianite crystallizes clear and only colours blue as it is exposed, that it messes up archeological PCR tests, and that it played a role in indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest. “Vivianite was not used on mundane objects” says Melonie Ancheta, a specialist in ancient indigenous colour and founder of Pigments Revealed International, a new organization that I sit on the board of, “it was reserved for use only by the elite, and those who required or used supernatural powers like warriors and shamans. The Haida,” Ancheta continues, “believed blue was a colour that allowed communication and movement between worlds.”

Yeil X’eenh (Raven Screen), ca. 1810, Seattle Art Museum

But as significant as this mineral was, it was more living entity than precious gem, and the way that it so happily shared its colour with the slightest touch of my fingers, and the way that it sparkled on my skin, told me what to do. I would have to talk to Lux…

Lux Logan, self-directed outfit, age 4, photographed by Natalie Matutschovsky

Extreme Beauty

Lux, my eldest, was born glam. She has been practicing norm-exploding forms of beauty and re-inventive art forms since before they were talking (see above) but it was just a few years ago at the makeup table of an ex-boyfriend surrounded by powders and brushes and palettes that they got ‘the go-ahead’ to to pick up a makeup brush. There was no looking back.

Lux who uses the pronouns she/they is an abstract film-maker, classically-trained hyper-pop musician, and student at Etobicoke School of the Arts (that incredible Toronto high school that Keanu Reeves may or may not have been kicked out of back in the day). And Lux uses and understands makeup in a way that I am just beginning to comprehend. Every afternoon, school or no school, rave or no rave, Lux descends downstairs from my former studio to walk the dog with a look that is mind-blowing, inspiring, evolving, and a radical political act. It seemed fitting to put the vivianite in their hands, and as an inkmaker, I was excited to branch out and see if I could make a makeup that Lux could use as an experiment with natural mineral pigment. I also wanted to talk about makeup. But first the material.

The material

“You begin with the possibilities of the material.”—Robert Rauschenberg

The vivianite was easy to grind down into a silky dust dust that I compressed to make a glinting greyblue powder that was soft enough to be brushed onto skin. By mixing the pigment with treegum binder and water, Lux and I also tested out a kind of paint to make finer lines, but in the end, it was pure, finely-ground, vivianite that worked the best. After creating a look, explaining “fallout, contouring,” and a few other mysterious makeup terms to me, noting the powder’s kind of satisfying mineral scent, complimenting its subtle colour, and noting its slightly peculiar feeling on the skin, Lux offered the judgement I was most hoping for this vivianite powder. “It could pass.” I’d made wearable makeup. The rock was speaking in a new voice. But there was another layer I was trying to uncover, and as Lux and I talked through their relationship with makeup I started to see it. I started to see them.

“Everything is real.” —Lux Logan

Lux explained that they like to draw circle lips using blends and fades to create more rounded features that counteract the structure of a sharp angular face, and that they were trying to get as far away as possible from their biological features. And at first I heard this as using makeup to cover or distract what they didn’t like while emphasizing preferred softer, more feminine forms. And that feels like a common assumption about makeup: that it involves concealing, fakery, and misdirection in the name of some beauty norm.

That wasn’t quite it. For Lux, makeup is an art, and her face is the blank slate on which to start building. In their words they create, “a 3D iteration of a face onto my face.” When this new face goes out into the world, Lux is able not only to create, but to “live out” an interactive artwork. But that still wasn’t quite it. These faces that Lux has developed are not inventive costumes or masks, or even singular artworks, they are an act of becoming. The faces are an extension of her identity as a non-binary trans queer insect-inspired alien creature. As they put it, “this is not a costume, it’s just me.” I’ve come to understand that makeup can reveal and heal as much as it can cover and avoid. As a genre, Lux’s aesthetic is known as extreme beauty. What I have come to understand is that the extreme is not the look, but the gap between how they see and feel themselves and how that self gets seen and interpreted in our world. The gap can be daunting. The world (colonial, patriarchal, capitalist, white-suprematist, transphobic and heteronormative) that we live in, can make getting to “just me” a daily, even deadly, battle. It’s in these daily battles that the transformative, medicinal magic of makeup shows its true colours.

After two makeup sessions there was still a bit of the finely ground vivianite powder left which I mixed with salt water and pine gum to make a moody blue ink. The ink seemed to get more complicated as it moved across the paper and even after it was dried seemed to be in a permanent state of becoming—beautiful, changing and alive.

This was part 2 from last week’s newsletter. Have a look here if you missed it. It was great to see so many friendly faces at the the online talk this week with Botanical Colors. And as always, hoping you can join the comments section, spread the word, sign-up or pass along this newsletter to the kind of people who are interested in the rabbit holes of place-based colour. JL