Week 12 Inspiration

What's funny is I found this book that explains how to make dyes and use fixatives and the process of dyeing fabric, which is from the 30's, and I didn't even think about it when I decided on the style and layout for that sketch I did of the vegetables and the chemical structures of their pigments.  The connection is definitely there, though.

Lia Melia, United Kingdom, "Hers", mixed media

I believe this is done with paints, but the way the colours run together reminds me of working with dye.  Just as an experiment in technique, I might try to replicate this painting with dyes on fabric to see what I can do .

I wanted to do something like this with the flower bundle so that it would be more of a textile piece and less just a demonstration of dye methods.  However, since the colour didn't work out, I'll have to hold off on this until I can find another way to produce the colour.  I'm tentative to just immerse it in either natural or synthetic dyes because I wanted the finished piece to reflect the process of making it, and I thought a flower-stitch or some kind of representation of the flower petals themselves would be fitting for a piece dyed with the colour produced by the flowers.

For anyone who hasn't already had me shove this book into their hands or faces and go on and on about how interesting it is, I ordered this book and it's really interesting and I love it and I love her and I love the idea of what she's doing.  Even the cover is inspiring.  I'm still only in the first chapter, in which Victoria recounts her travels through northern Australia, where she went to learn about the natural source of ochre, the types of ochre, the cultural uses for ochre and the sacredness surrounding ochre, particularly the colour red.  I am interested in the science of colour, but I like this book because while it might talk about that very briefly, it reads more like an ethnography, because Finlay is, after all, a social anthropologist.  I could not communicate how this could not possibly be any more up my alley.  Not only do you learn about the colour itself but what it might mean to different people, and maybe even what your own use of it might signify.  I'm very excited to get to the part about gamboge. 

Speaking of gamboge:

It's hard to distinguish because of the brightness of the image overall, but the darker area on the right of this tiny fragment of gamboge resin is darker not only because it is in shadow.  That orange-brown is actually the natural colour of gamboge in its solid, dry state.  The bright colour you see on the left, and yes, it really is that bright, is the "perfect yellow" that is the result of adding a drop of water to the resin.  The way the story was told on Radiolab, by, as it happens, Victoria Finlay, was so celebrated and mythical that the experience for me of acquiring my own little chunk of gamboge and performing this act of dripping a little water on it was basically ceremonial.  The plan for the painting of which this resin will be a part is basically to retell the story they told on Radiolab visually alongside the story that is being told through words.