Surfacing

Picturing and Writing Underwater Light

Dark Pines Underwater

This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.

Explorer, you tell yourself, this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green;
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.

But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.

—Gwendolyn MacEwen

Georgia O’Keeffe Lake George , Oil on Canvas 1922

Dear Readers and Colourlabists

Do you ever open your eyes underwater? What is that colour?

I grew up in a little white house heated by a woodstove tucked into the landscape above a small, round, deep lake that glistened through the trees at the end of a windy dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Draper Lake.

We kids read a book of Victorian fairy tales of the ice queen and the girl who trod on a loaf of bread its pages freckled with mould in the big grey barn with a horse and carriage and whips and harnesses and dust all locked up by our landlord Keith Shales who we were afraid of but we were small enough to slip through the crack in the sliding barn doors and we could not resist the boxes of old books.

In the evening Papa would carry all four of us all on his back down through the cedars to the water. He called it the Draper Lake Express.

The transparent spring coming from somewhere deep and cold drinking it was like some kind of new drink and it was a spring Mama had found and so it was where we let the baby painted turtle go even though we wanted to keep it. Its little claws touching the icy-clear new water that must have become a stream to feed the lake. The bloodsap of the bloodroot flowers that covered us in red orange markings in spring when we rolled down the hill that was the hill for learning to fly it curving down to a path beside the big round pink back of the granite rock hidden in the forrest. And the path wound through the woods to the tiny clearing with its snail shell beach ghostly at night. The turned-over boat on the white-green sand the old wise lake trout said to live in its depths. Draper lake was a deep green that disappeared into weedy darkness.

I thought the secret thing of lakes that I wanted to write to you was something concentrated in its depths. Maybe the old wise uncatchable fish. But I wonder now if that something of lakes is happening at their surface.

Sigrid von Lintig Eva 2018 Acrylic pigments on canvas

You know this colour too. You are looking up through the water like watching a film projected on a sheet. You are straining to see a world fractured and blurred by the wobble between underwater and above water. A world of mistranslated shapes and colours. This between-world is dreamy and inky but it is not pigments. It is mingled light broken up on the ceiling of lake and the glistening yellows and oranges are absorbed into the cool of the water and below the surface all the tiny particles of suspended silt that change the the directions of the light absorbing first the reds and then the oranges and yellow cooling sun energy to something green gold above and down into turquoises and blue the water everywhere absorbing and absorbing like a reverse rainbow into the muddy grey blues and lower into the blue black and finally all light is consumed by the lake.

A couple years ago I was at a cottage reading the Unpublished Journals of John Muir and I found Muir describing all the tiny moves that light makes. His entries flat and beautiful “Forenoon rainy, foggy and opaque. Afternoon glistening and transparent. Sunset common purple.” or “Tree and rock shadows on smooth bossy snow sheets” Over and over again he tries to get the words closer to what he is seeing. Later that same summer I learned that Muir with many of the early advocates for National Parks was a white supremacist and stopped reading the book in disgust.

The cottage lake where I was reading was not the Lake from childhood but it did have an old turtle named The General and a classic warped dock penciled out into a lake and I swam out to the floating dock and jumped off into that water that was like a mirror it was so still and let myself sink into and down dark green with my eyes open and then slowly rise to the surface goldened by water-sun and breaking the surface your eyes still glistening with lake and liquifying the scene. Through all this I looked and looked and looked. And I thought there is no ink that I could make that touches this in-between world of seeing through water. And so instead I tried to make the colour with words and the words stayed in my sketchbook until this week.

Colour Notes from my August 2020 sketchbook

This year I do not have a Lake to go to but I am beginning to make colour again. There are things to harvest on the streets and in the ravines and back alleys and I am wondering can I describe what I saw. Is it the words or the inks? Is it the memory or the mistranslation of the memory?

In other news: I have an two-part online workshop tomorrow (Saturday 13 August) and next Saturday 20 August with the New York Botanical Gardens. And there are still a few spaces left. It was really fun last year with Inkmaking and colour foraging basics in week one and amazing obscure problem solving tips and logistics from students of natural colour from around the world in week 2.

Also The Colour of Ink (the film!) will be having its world premiere at TIFF in September. Lots more about the documentary soon.

Also as usual I am humbly asking free readers to consider a paying subscription to support the work of the colour revolution plus you get more stuff. This week the full series of underwater ink tests. Plus full access to the archives, commentary and the Colour Lab network.

Happy swimming and inking

Jason