Snowbound

a holiday visual interlude in white

“Snow is what it does.”

—Frederick Seidel

In Make Ink: A Foragers Guide to Natural Inkmaking, I wrote a bit about white as a counterintuitive colour for ink and I mentioned that it’s traditionally made from a somewhat toxic commingling of lead, straw, and urine. In my forthcoming How to be a Colour Wizard, I’ve developed a kid-friendly recipe for making your own sidewalk chalk. In The Colour of Ink, there is an amazing sequence that documents a collaborative white ink project that developed between Soraya Syed, Marta Abbot, and me, with help from the Carrara marble quarry along with a pretty elaborate system of camera operators and remote direction, Canada Post, and a drone that I still can’t believe we pulled off in the midst of a pandemic. I love talking about the calcium in bones and shellfish and chalk and drywall dust. I love the way that calcium rich materials make a glittery reflective dust that bound just right develop into a beautiful white ink. But the snow this weekend is something else. I am looking out the window at a winter blizzard that’s hit Canada and the northern US and seems to be whiting out my festive family plans. I am noticing the snow’s gentle, slow, relentless falling. The way it erases shape and distance. And honestly I don’t know what to think, I am not sure snow has a message any more than just doing its thing. So in the spirit of the holidays I thought I would offer you not recipes or research, but a kind of visual journal of snowy, blizzardy white, which if you batten down the hatches and get under the covers, might bring, if not comfort, at least calm. Happy Holidays from the Toronto Ink Company.

Lauren Kolyn

Cy Twombly