The First Day of School
Learning in landscape.
Happy Fall Everyone. I’ve been thinking about school.
There is something synesthetic about going back to school. It’s the shimmer of the calico aggregate stone floors and the sound of the buffering machine and the smell of cleaner and the sound of lockers closing their flexible iron shoved in with your knee while you turn the Yale lock sideways to fit it in. The smell of the bathroom and the library and chalk-dust and the gym and old sandwich crusts in ziplock bags all in the milky light that pours down the hallway out the window to the playground sounds. Some child is always crying on the first day mingled with the greetings of old friends seeing each other for the first time since their new haircut and outside is golden sunlight with just the glint of cold under it and the grass is freshly cut but dead oak leaves are ground up with it and so it feels like everything at once. And also this is all wrong because I am seeing things backwards remembering the first day of school when the first day of school is actually the opposite of remembering its pure looking forward and dread and excitement. It’s being inside all these senses and feelings without understanding what is going on.
The autumnal mixing up of the senses, the feeling of looking forward to the unknown and first-day-of-school beginner’s mind come together for me in workshops. I just led a great adult learning course for the New York Botanical Gardens (totally online, a bit surreal, ending in a hotel in Queens, long story) and I have been talking with my tree expert friend Eric about designing a new high-end workshop around oak trees, hidden canoes, sassafras root elixirs, and GPS treasure maps in High Park’s Oak Savanah. But most of all I am remembering back few years ago to one of my favourite workshops in one of my favourite wild urban worlds at the Albany Bulb in the Bay area. I led two workshops there with the help of and in support of Love the Bulb a group dedicated to keeping this peculiar landscape peculiar. You kind of have to go there to see the coming together of bricks and rebar and oxalis flowers and seaweed and the bits of ripped up interstate tar and wild fennel flowers and hippy sculptures and acorns and garbage and the ruins of a homeless encampment castle— the kind of symphony particularly appreciated by the urban colour-forager. We pulled in a portable stove, empty bottles, recipe books, funnels, coffee filters, and old cooking pots in a child’s wagon along a track surrounded in weedy flowers and scrub and blackberry brambles and out to the main bulb that gives the most luxuriant 360 view of some of the most expensive real estate in the world. And it is just wild. I learned so much about California indigenous plants and dye colours and so much about hacking together group inks and so much about the urban sketchers of San Francisco and witchcraft involved in pickling a redwood pinecone into a kind of ink, and the joys of making sand globes, and how difficult it is to work with seaweed, and million other side adventures and learnings. I ran this workshop two years and during the second time a guy named Jon stopped me to say that he was taking the workshop for the second time and let me know that he had been so inspired by the workshop and my book and the permission to really play with colour foraging and he put a bottle of ink that he had made into my hands and it was a bottle of ink made entirely of library pencils.
I still have that bottle of ink. It sits beside a tiny vial of eraser bits from Wendy MacNaughton who herself is a deep observer of libraries.
Here’s what Jon says about his project:
“I love libraries. They are all unique, but usually have the same sense of timelessness inside. The library pencil is ubiquitous to the library experience - short, stubby, sharply pointed. Library pencil gray is a shimmery mix of charcoaled library pencils - a deep, dark swirl of graphite and wood charcoal. It was one of the first inks I made that wasn’t simply following a recipe. I took the ideas of your book and tried to capture a sense of place through the ink making.”
For a recipe on how to carbonize anything I hope you will buy my book or find it in a library and join the make-your-own-colour revolution. Also please subscribe or spread the word on this newsletter.
What are you learning about colour and materials these days? What do you want to learn? Where do you want to learn it. How much would pay for a very crafted workshop dedicated to inkmaking and colour-foraging? Is there a colour of the first day of school? How can I get back to California?
Image with yellow flags shows California native, Monkey flower. Did you make ink from it?
the first day back at school this year was special and hard. full time instructor for nine months. it was tinted with the plastic kickboards around my office peeled from the wall, a mix of drywall dust, forever-old glue (the kind that has aged for so many years and ended up a damped ochre), and shards of the electric blue the entire room had been painted by the office occupant before me.
it’s still a construction zone but there’s something okay about the filtered light and the continued changes in scenery as it is repainted and repaired.