Wait for it

In Defence of Lazy Summer Colour

Right now, right here, on the porch with a soft breeze through the silvery Russian olive tree and the sound of the clothesline bringing in fresh sheets singing with the crickets in the field with the spiralled hay bales and the pears speckling pinkish orange over green, and the grass high and the goldenrod just starting to bloom and the clouds puffy and white like the sky in that French documentary with the close-up bugs, and I am about to go for a swim in the river at the secret spot and all of this means it’s perfect high summer and still, even with all of this, I can feel it. The summer is almost over. It makes me nervous. I should be harvesting that goldenrod and testing out the new recipe and writing about it, I should be arranging the photoshoot for the fall. I should be developing an ink for the film festival. I should be planning my next move, figuring out what do about a studio space which is still kind of crammed into my basement. I should be taking pictures of those large inkworks and take them down to the shop to be sold to pay for all the complexities that are coming. As an artist and inkmaker, as a father and writer, I should be ramping up for all the business of Fall. Or should I? This suspended moment of lazy beauty where all the colours of the whole year are distilling inside the vines and roots and berries and flowers where things are becoming their fullest is sending a message not to get busy and get to work, but to relax and soak up this last of the summer. So. This newsletter contains no extra-recipes, no new discoveries, no elaborate stories or secret ingredients or updates on what I am up to. Just one un-secret piece of advice. Give it time.

Please consider this note permission to do nothing, give yourself some slack and simply soak up the last of the summer days, with love from Jason

An oak gall, which had to wait for the oak wasp to leave its winter home which when crushed and powdered and added to iron will become the most intense archival black ink.

Oak gall ink becoming.

Tomas Tranströmer, Elegy

Large inkwork, still drying, made with the last of last year’s pigments and bits of fermented grape skin.