Place and Meaning

Foraged spills, The Artist's Residency and a Call out to Pigment lovers

The Blank Page

I’ve been working on my children’s book (again!) at an artist residency downtown. The Space was generously provided by Carla Gilders who is the mother of my late (and infinitely missed) experimental writer, Milton scholar, ball cap and sneaker fetishist, dog dance partner and forever friend to me and whole network of others Adam Penn-Gilders . I promised myself that I would bring no art materials just a pen and my computer and stack of old sketchbooks and really force myself to write. But I was cleaning the fridge and found a bright magenta stain (marking) on the glass and soon I found myself breaking out the Case For Making Water Colour Grid Paper and making a kind of map of time and place.

The Grid of Place and Time

[ by row left to right, then top to bottom ]

1. Magenta Fridge shelf stain

2. Turmeric bound with free range egg yolk

3. Balcony-intensified Kashmir Tchai

4. Tabasco sauce

5. Beet Juice in red vinegar

6. Stainless Steel Polish

7. Bluing cube with Clorox Spray

8. French Press coffee

9. Tarragon stain

10. Bacterial ochre-dyed grasses suspended in water droplet

11. Bitter green tea

12. Korean ink stick chunk loosened in Water (Gift of Beau Rhee)

13. Korean ink stick chunk, ground (Gift of Beau Rhee)

14. Toronto Ink Company Lamp Black which somehow snuck into my suitcase

15. Bluing cube with honey (more on this in future episodes)

16. Kashmir Tchai (Day 3)

17. Thai hot jelly

18. Yellow mustard

19. Mint sauce

20. Red Sour Cherry syrup (Poland)

21. Tamarind paste

22. Pilot G5 pen

23. Tamari drip

24. Turmeric capsule dust dissolved in hand sanitizer.

25. Last espresso of the residence

    Sketching out a children’s book about natural colour.

A few bits I liked from the old sketchbooks. I like the guy wearing the rust shirt and beetroot pants I also hope that some celebration of spit makes it into the final product.

An opportunity for group Collaboration

Maybe you saw on instagram but Toronto Ink Company will be part of a symposium next week with some of the most important pigment people across the globe for the first time ever. As part of the conference on Thursday Tilke Elkins of The Wild Pigment Project and I have cooked up something called “Waving in Place” which is a group enactment of place-based colour come to life as little twinkling squares on Zoom. You can find out more how it works here:

So where does your colour come from?

And what is its story? What happens when the materials of art become the subject of art? And is anyone reading this newsletter and looking at the inside of their refrigerator in a new way and spreading the word about this newsletter. I hope so. Maybe I need more buttons. Next week I will figure out how to change the colour of the button. But for now please do…