Pinkish

My mother picked crab-apples off the Glasgow apple trees and pounded them with chillies to change her homesickness into green chutney. — Imtiaz Dharker

Filtered cactus flowers on akai ceramic plates photograph ©torontoinkcompany

I was thinking about the cherry blossoms but I was stealing the late night blossoms of the crab apple trees and the sky was midnight blue and the lights of the city strung out over the pond like candies. The crabapple blossoms are at their most intense when they are still tight fisted buds deep magenta pink with enough pigment to make what ends up being a pretty faint blush. I was on a mission to make a set of inks for Yuri Shimojo last of a samurai clan, self-taught and precise and delicate and explosive all at the same time and I wanted to make something to suit her and I was thinking about here series of tiny petal mandalas molecular and pulsing and commemorative and trying to picture how I could use the little pieces of glimmering amber cherry sap I had harvested on a strange day last fall in the park. I love collecting at night. I love trying to picture the sort of ink an artist that I love might be inspired and surprised by. I love sending out mail and imagining what it might do or not do in some studio far away. Yuri also got me thinking about grey and pink and how perfect that combination is. I started with pouring boiling water over the very pinkest of the blossoms and watching a kind of ink form in the swirling of my beaker but the boiling water was too much for the delicate blossoms and they turned the water yellow like tea. Then I tried soaking the petals overnight in pure alcohol. This seemed to do nothing but on paper actually formed a very faint grey ink which I am still investigating. Finally I added salt flakes and white vinegar and let the petals soak in that bath for a few days and slowly slowly the liquid stained a delicate pink, adding the cherry sap which I dried and ground and re-hydrated into a peachy coloured gum made a pretty subtle pink washy ink. The picture above was using blossoms from a cactus flower that someone sent me in wax paper years ago (who were you?) I am still using this cactus flowers to great effect an almost electric pink that makes me think of the rich pink of the cochineal ink from Manual Loera Fernández the engineer-inkmaker-bugfarmer. I sent her also a kind of pixilated ink that fell apart in the water and a grey pixalated twin. I love particulates the way they drift around in water both of it and yet not quite integrated into it. More and more I like to ignore the filter and just let the pieces fall where they may.

Thank you to Marta Abbott for introducing me to Yng-Ru Chen of Praise Shadows who in turn introduced me to Yuri and then Brian Johnson reintroduced us again.