Yes, you can make paint out of rocks. I’ll admit it takes a bit of effort, but there is something so exciting about picking up a rock, and discovering if it will make a good color-or not. The first magical thing about this is that a rock can look like one color when it’s solid, and another color when it’s pulverized into a powder to make pigment. Pigment is what gives paint its color. If you use oil for example, the oil is the same color no matter what color of paint you make; the oil is the binding material, and the pigment is what gives it the color. So getting back to the magic part-a pink rock gave me orange paint, a grey rock gave me green paint, and yes, a yellow ochre colored rock gave me yellow ochre color. But then one super bright orange rock gave me literally no color. I can’t explain it, I need to talk to a geologist. At one time, these rocks were on the roof of College Center on the NCC Bethlehem campus. I have no idea why there were rocks on the roof, but there were, and when it was decided to take them off. Walter Heath, ceramics professor at the college when he learned that they were being removed, asked where they were going. When he was told they were going to throw them away, he convinced them instead to dump them at the East 40.
While I was in the process of proposing the residency, I picked up a handful of the river rocks. I began the hard way, smashing them with a hammer. (Don’t do this at home unless you are wearing safety goggles, and have the rocks in something so shards don’t go flying all over the place.) Once I pounded the rock into little chips, I used a granite mortar and pestle to grind them into powder. I used some egg yolk and this powder to make egg tempera paint. I also tested some that I ground down into finer particles with a glass muller. I got two slightly different colors from each rock, the more gritty rock would usually be darker, the more finely ground lighter and somewhat different in color. You can see my egg tempera swatches and a photo of the rocks they came from above. Particle size is not the only thing that affects the color; rocks heated to different temperatures will change color. I did a test tile with 9 different pigments, 8 of them pigments I made and only one bought pigment. While the clay was wet, I cut the tile in 3 sections so each section can be fired to a different temperature. I’ll have to share the results of that when they have been fired. Walter had already done some rock grinding pre-Covid, with the intent of using them in making glazes. He is letting me use a tool that I didn’t know existed, something he calls a “knuckle grinder.” Apparently it’s a prospector’s tool. Contrary to the title, this contraption is less dangerous than my hammer method since the rocks are way more contained. It’s a simple and ingenious invention, see the first photo at the top. There is a solid metal cylinder with a handle; and another metal cylinder that has a bottom and sides but no top, just large enough that the heavy cylinder can slide down into it. You put a rock in the hollow cylinder, grab the handle on the solid heavy one, and smash the rock below. There is a mechanical rock grinder and ball mill that I will hopefully use later in the residency, but bringing in the machines is for when I have a larger quantity to grind. I’m still really only in the testing phase, figuring out what is worth grinding. It’s a very slow and laborious way to get colors, I wouldn't blame you if you said I've got rocks in my head.. And yes, I really will eventually do actual paintings with these paints.
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June 1 I began a 10-week artist residency on NCC’s East 40. I had every intention of blogging almost eery day, but here I am with so much going on it was hard to figure out where to start. So I’ll start with the East 40 itself. I’m not a selfie person, but the first day of the residency the weather was so glorious, and I wanted something to post about the residency so I broke down and did one. The East 40 is literally 40 acres on the East end of the Northampton Community College campus. It’s still off the grid-solar panels and propane tanks for power, rain catchment for water and um, a composting toilet. It’s part community garden, part nature preserve, part outdoor classroom, part pottery studio and part anything you can dream up-including an artist residency. Last year was the pilot year for the residency, thanks to professor Rachael Gorchov. I contacted her earlier in the year, she put me in touch with Kelly Allen who is in charge of the East 40 and he plugged me in to many resources at the college. This residency is still in its infancy, but I’m honored to be one of the pioneers, so to speak. The “product” of this residency won’t just be my artwork, but instructional materials that can be used by any NCC faculty and a community education class in natural dye and art materials. On day one, Kelly root-tilled a plot near the ceramics shed that is my home base so to speak for the residency so I could grow dye plants, woad in particular. I spent all day in the sun (with 100+ sun block on) pulling weeds out of the bed he just tilled. I only had time to plant half the bed with woad seeds. It’s been fun to watch the woad sprout and grow along with the residency. Yesterday I spent hours again pulling weeds, as I will seed most of the rest of the bed today. So why am I planting woad for an artist residency, you may be wondering. Woad is one of the oldest and most color-fast blue dye. And it wasn’t just a dye-it was also used as a pigment, and I intend to use it both to dye fiber and to attempt to make a pigment. Pigments the solid, inert, and color-fast material that gives paint its color. So if I make a pigment, I can add oil for oil paint-or egg for egg tempera, gum arabic and other ingredients for pastel, gouache, watercolor etc. Of course, I’m going to use the art supplies once I make enough of them. I’ve done a whole lot more than plant woad so far, but this is enough for one post. After making the lake pigments, it dawned on me I already had clay that was dug from the Northampton Community College (NCC) “East 40” part of the campus. Last year when I made loom weights for my warp-weighted loom, I carefully scooped the finest clay from the top of the barrel knowing it could be used as pigment. It was still wet in the jar.
I discovered that the same spreading out on the glass thing worked perfectly to dry what I’m calling “NCC Gold Ochre” for it’s origin and color. I find it just extraordinary that clay dug from the earth-right on a campus where I work-can be converted into pigment with sifting/straining, water, gravity, all simple manipulations. After the super water-logged lake pigments that took considerable amounts of spreading out to dry, I found the NCC gold ochre yielded a lot of finished powder pigment by comparison.
In January whenI did my Madder (plant root) and Cochineal (bug that lives on prickly pear cactus) dye pots, I decided to take the plunge into lake pigments. I remember decades ago when I first got serious about painting, reading about lake pigments but I only began natural dyeing in 2018. And then it wasn’t until reading “The Art & Science of Natural Dyes” did I discover I could make a lake pigment out of the “exhaust” dye after dyeing fiber! The alchemy of taking natural dye and converting it to a solid pigment was easier than I dared hope. I had both chemicals on the shelf already-and they are both on the shelves in your local grocery store. It starts with an acid, alum-used in making pickles, which is followed by the addition of the alkali washing soda, which you can find in the laundry aisle. It makes this lovely fizz, like the volcano you made in 6th grade science. Then the dye becomes a solid and settles to the bottom. Simple. Well, then you have to get rid of all the extra water. The idea is head-slapping simple. The laborious part is getting rid of the water. At first I just took a sauce pan (that does not get used for cooking anymore) and bailed out the now-clear water at the top, once the pigment settled to the bottom. Even that is slightly tricky to do without stirring up the sediment-the pigment-at the bottom. Then comes the giant coffee filter lining a metal mesh strainer, and taking the sludge left in the coffee filter after the water drips through, and putting it in jars. Even after that filtration, the pigment sludge just had too much water to make even water-based paints like watercolor. I spread out the sludge on a large plate of glass and let it dry. Et voila! What I scraped off the glass is a dried powder that can be used for any media-oil, egg tempera, watercolor, pastel, crayon etc.! I was hooked. Now I’m on a pigment quest, exploring what I can do the very, very old school way with making pigments and varied types of paint from those pigments. While I’m not “done” with the sort of weavings and paintings I showed in my thesis exhibition, I’m already researching and sketching for a new project-liturgical banners. I don’t recall when these little flag like things with “Happy Spring” or Santa Claus or whatever started sprouting up on suburban lawns-it was probably while I was living in NYC. Since moving to Easton, they seem only to be multiplying-along with the tribe affiliation lawn signs, flags and banners. I had the idea of using the same hardware as most folks use for their seasonal banners or flags, but making, and displaying in the appropriate season, liturgical banners.
My husband’s Christmas gift of the book “English Medieval Embroidery; Opus Anglicanum” is a gold mine for my research. As some of you might know, I’m a huge fan of deep reds, and reds often play key roles in my painting, dyeing and weaving, have ever since I started making paintings. To my surprise and delight, this book has a huge amount of embroidery on deep red velvet-it is on the cover, it dominates the background for embroideries throughout the book. I was so inspired I ordered silk velvet-suitably to dye-along with embroidery threads, also ready to dye. Yesterday at church, the priest held up the church copy of the book of gospels, which had repoussé metal on the corners and a medallion on the center of the cover, over a background of-you guessed it-of deep red velvet. Then he pointed to the metal cross that was on a background of brocade fabric and asked if I could replace the current fabric with red velvet! Mind you, I had already ordered silk velvet, and had intended to try both Madder root and cochineal to dye it red. So marvelously enough, it looks like I’m actually going to be doing a real liturgical textile project before I even start on my liturgical banners for the house project! Yes, I’m binge watching the Twilight Zone for New Year’s. There is one episode in particular that has afflicted and haunted me since I first watched it. It really hits a nerve; “Time enough at last.” A simple man who just wants the freedom to read, but is oppressed by his life including his job at the bank, sneaks into the bank vault at lunch to read. His desire in life is simple-to read. The bomb gets dropped while he is in the vault, and he emerges the only man left alive. O.k., so he would have been burned up by the fallout, but lets suspend that reality because we are after all in the Twilight Zone. He finds a grocery store-all the food he could ever eat and more. But he is alone and desolate, until he spots the Public Library. He is overjoyed. He selects and stacks up piles and piles and piles of books. Finally, there is enough time. All the time I need, all the time I want. He bends down to pick up a book, and his glasses fall off, you can hear the lenses breaking. He manages to pick up the glasses, the camera gives us a sample of the extremely blurred vision he has without them, and the lenses simply fall out.
Now that I’m retired from my full-time job, there is enough time at last. This episode had a particular resonance when I watched it this year, on January 1, the first day of my retirement. I don’t take a minute for granted. “A place for everything, and everything in its place.”
When I was a kid, I dreaded my mother uttering this sentence. At best, it meant put that thing away, don’t leave it where you have it now. At worst, it meant clean your room. When we lived in Philadelphia “the room” that would need cleaning was my playroom. I wasn’t allowed to keep any toys in my bedroom. We lived in a huge old Victorian that I loved and my mother hated. She hated it was too big, she couldn’t possibly keep it clean, you needed servants for a place that big and of course that was way beyond our means. The only reason we could live in that huge house, in that neighborhood, was that it was owned by the church where my dad was the pastor. My playroom was actually an “observatory,” that is, an indoor greenhouse linked to the main house. There were very wide windowsills that my mom filled with tropical plants when it got too cold for them outside. The entire interior of the room was where I played. Now that I think of it. there wasn’t much of any furniture I can recall. No wonder my stuff was always all over the floor. It was easy for my parents to ignore it, to close the door if company came over. Yo didn’t have to go through that room to go anywhere, it was in the back of the house. Why can’t I remember any furniture? There must have been some place to put my stuff away. My parents were amazed I always knew where everything was in that mess. When asked, I could find the kitchen scissors, or whatever I has swiped from them in an instant. But once every so often, they would “clean it up.” Half finished projects were rent asunder. What was organization to them was chaos to me. Thus the dread when my mom got to saying “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” too often. It was the harbinger of the dreaded room cleaning. Fast forward fifty something years, summer 2019. I go down to MICA for my summer grad school intensive, leaving behind my husband to do repairs on the house which is in full-on renovation mode. Lumber and or tools in every room in the house. Impossible to clean. Stuff everywhere. In my studio at MICA, I have only my own things. No chop saw or gallons of paint to step over. I started hanging up materials on the walls, the cords and yarn and rovings, in a color palette inspired system. A place for everything, and everything in its place started running though my head like a mantra. The meaning had totally flipped. Ordering things was a kind of thinking, and the order freed me to move forward with other things. I realized in that first week of the summer intensive, how much environment could encourage-or discourage-my studio practice. My mother died in 1979, that her words came to me, helped guide me felt good, like I haven’t forgotten her. My full-time job of the better part of 19 years ended officially yesterday, December 31, 2021. Today I begin a new life where I don’t have to get up at 5:30 every morning 5 days a week and come home exhausted and try to teach as an adjunct and do my art during that exhausted time when I wasn’t at work or getting ready to go to work or driving to and from work. A place for everything, and everything in its place no longer needs quotations because it’s now mine. I want to order my life around what I think is important. Sure, getting stuff organized, at least every so often is helpful. But those words are a lot more now. I want to organize my life purposefully, to put my time and resources where they are most important. As a professor, the end of the semester always brings mixed feelings, and this one more so than usual. It was the first time I taught two classes in the same semester; I have a full time job in the day when nearly all of the classes are scheduled. Not to mention that I'm in the MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art) low-residency Studio art program. The drawing I class that I taught was small but mighty-on the one hand I was so sad that class is over. But of course on the other hand I'm so glad I have more time for-egads, there is so much I've been neglecting.
Research paper handed in, Professional Practice project done, now I finally am able to put more time into my studio work. I just finished preparing 3 panels for a triptych. I finished weaving panel #2 of Tagor's scarf, and have a bunch of other things taking shape. I usually love putting up the Christmas tree and decorations. Sadly, it isn't going to happen this year. I can't do everything, something had to go. I will get to see some family, but had to toss out all the other Christmas-y things I usually like to do. Which is fine. Sometimes you have to let go of the traditions and embrace love of God and love of fellow humans, and realize what's really important. Once upon a time, if you weren't doing merchandising on your site, you didn't need SSL. But I bought it anyway. Without any reminders from my host, I discovered the SSL had run out when I went onto my site and got a scary warning from Chrome about how the site had malware, and prompting me to go back to "safety." Great. So I paid up for another year.
Next day, I made the mistake of updating my Adobe software. It broke my website. More pop-ups, not as scary, but saying there were broken or missing files, and the background was showing up wrong. Then I found out that Adobe was discontinuing the software I had been using to author the site. At that point I concluded that trying to fix my broken site was a waste of time. I went back to the drawing board and started over with website builder tools that I found through my web hosting company. I feel like a wimp-I wrote my first functional web page in a text editor using straight HTML. But it's enough work to just gather and upload all the content, I'll have to restrain my inner geek any hope you all enjoy the new website! |
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