Ukraine

I was going to write something else. I wanted to conjure up the artist’s residency dream of colour that I was living in for a week and not listening to the news. I wanted you to go with me into the colour. But I could not write that today.

And then I thought I would write something about the yellow wheat and blue sky or golden domes and blue river of the flag before that. And then I thought I would talk about Maria Prymachenko and Sonia Delaunay and Kazimir Malevich and a Iya Kiva’s poem about ink. And then I read a bit of the news and I read about the stickers that parents were giving their kids for the label on their clothes with their name and blood type on the sticker, and then I did not want to write anything.

I stopped writing and I found the last of Canadian goldenrod ink down in the basement and a tiny vial with a tiny dram of dust of Yves Klein Blue pigment from a friend, and the copper oxide ink that I was making while I was away. I cut twenty five, five-inch squares of Stonehenge paper, and I just started putting those two colours together, letting the ingredients come together on the paper in their own way. After a while I changed the yellow ink to a shot of vodka with turmeric in it which was an even brighter yellow. I can’t think of anything else to do or to tell you. I do not believe in war but I also do not believe in peace that accepts a dictatorship. I always want to write about the ground at my feet and not about politics or what other people are talking about, but the ground at my feet, if I am to really stand on it, is the ground that is at every human’s feet, so I made these squares and I will drop them off at Horses Atelier, and if you buy one, the proceeds will go to help the people of the Ukraine.

If you join the lab you can read a list of everything that I have ever made blue or yellow ink out of. Maybe it will just be a list of stuff. Or maybe somewhere in that stuff is something noticed and found, experienced and shared. Or simply and painfully, grounded.

Jason