transart.Y1:localColour
My first year project studies at the Transart Institute focused on exploring Local Colour. The term, “Local Colour” is one that I’m adapting in an attempt to conceptualize something I’ve noticed as I visit different places looking for pigments: Every place I visit has an unique colour! Here’s an excerpt from my paper on the topic that explains more:
Every place has a local-colour. This colour is significant within a region and can be best understood as a permeating indigenous material. The specific hue of a local-colour can become synonymous with a historic, cultural or regional identity. However, in our modern epoch, we are less aware of these connections due to the consumeristic tendency to provide a repeatable brand which has made it all but impossible for our daily objects and materials to still connect us with such a local narrative.
pictoral overview
My first year project studies at the Transart Institute focused on exploring Local Colour. The term, “Local Colour” is one that I’m adapting in an attempt to conceptualize something I’ve noticed as I visit different places looking for pigments: Every place I visit has an unique colour! Here’s an excerpt from my paper on the topic that explains more:
“Every place has a local-colour. This colour is significant within a region and can be best understood as a permeating indigenous material. The specific hue of a local-colour can become synonymous with a historic, cultural or regional identity. However, in our modern epoch, we are less aware of these connections due to the consumeristic tendency to provide a repeatable brand which has made it all but impossible for our daily objects and materials to still connect us with such a local narrative.
…
This narrative is important in that it provides ways of defining worth, and worthlessness outside the industry-controlled concepts of supply and demand, and setting quarterly trends for the consumer. When a person works long and hard to create something, its personal value is assured. That value is not diminished as it is passed from one generation to another. In bestowing that effort on a material of local significance, the effect is even more strong as it becomes something of value for the whole community.”
(Have I piqued your interest? If so, you can read the whole paper here (link to come once paper completed).)
My project’s foundation was based on three specific locations across Ontario, Canada: Cobalt, Madoc and Conestoga. All three are places had abandoned mining operations.
step.1: Place through colour: “Red Pine of Cobalt”
If a sense of Local Colour was going to be preserved in the final work, I realized early on that each painting must be restricted to a single mineral source. If yellow from place X was combined with blue from place Y, the resulting XY green would loose any sense of a specific areas permeating Local Colour. So, each painting’s palette needed to be created from a single source and therefore I took on the challenge of creating all possible colours from a single rock.
Cobalt, Ontario
The first place I visited in search of Local Colour was Cobalt, Ontario. Cobalt is an historic silver town. Roughly a century ago there were hundreds of active mines that produced nearly 1000 tons of silver yearly. It was the largest silver producing area in the world, for a time! But, by 1930 this activity was almost all gone and today only the foundations of the great mining buildings remain alongside the great gashes into the earth where the silver was mined.
But it’s the town’s namesake, the hard, lustrous, gray metal, that I was interested in. Minerals high in Cobalt have been used since ancient times to produce colour, but this was mainly in glass. At the beginning of the 1800′s a manufactured blue and green pigment were created from cobalt, and this use continues today.
On this rock-hounding expedition I was joined by three others: Reiner, Robert and Maggie. Our trip north took 8 hours. Once there, we made arrangements at a local motel for our accommodations and then went for a tour of the general area, visiting North Cobalt, Haileybury and New Liskeard before stopping for a little supper. After dinner we headed back into Cobalt and Reiner gave us an introductory tour of some of the mines. Reiner’s history in this area goes back a long way. He was introduced to collecting in the area by his father, and even worked a summer in the mines years ago, so the maze of little used roads were straightforward to him.
It is an odd sensation to stand upon ground that was once a busy beehive of activity. Especially when only hints like a pile of rocks, or part of foundation, remain. I think that some people would talk about the echo or ghosts of such an area … but, given that the area’s excitement and enterprises properly belongs to a forgone era, I found myself standing on these sites feeling like I was the ghost. My presence was only a small insignificant part of the area’s history and if such a place remembers it’s history as a culmination of times remembered (identifying itself by looking both backward and forward in time) my time there was only a fleeting shadow compared to those of the past.
After spending four days exploring abandoned mining sites, here is a sample of the minerals that I brought back to my studio:
minerals collected up in Cobalt (click on one for more details)
Once back in the studio I realized that my search for Local Colour might not be best met by a highly processed pigment like those produced from the mineral cobalt. Instead, I turned my attention to the annabergite we had collected. In its pure form, this mineral is a mint green, but the sample had obvious “impurities” that made it somehow indicative of the area, and also interesting as a pigment. At this point in the project I didn’t subject the annabergite pigment to heat though … and there were two reasons for this: First, there wasn’t any lure (there is no documentation on what burning annabergite would do) and secondly,it could be really, really dangerous (vaporized arsenic fumes)! But, by carefully cleaning and controlling the particle size of the pigment through decanting, I did end up with an interesting range of possible greens from a mint-green to a bright Paris-green.
Woad Harvest
this year’s woad harvest (click on one for more details)
Another form that Local Colour can take comes from the vegetation within a region. So, in the spring I left a couple of plots “unplanted” in the family garden. Instead I shook out woad seeds, which I collected last fall, over the earth and let the plots be. As I had hoped, the woad plants grew up among other weeds. But when it went down to 6 °C (43 °F) and some of the leaves on the plants turned blue it was past time to begin the woad harvest (once the leaves turn blue the indigo pigment can’t be extracted from anymore).My assistant (my daughter) was available for the morning, so she and I carefully picked woad leaves for a couple of hours. It was nice work, the morning being sunny but cool; which makes working a pleasant and useful way of keeping warm. In the end, we collected a small container of leaves that looked healthily green. We washed the leaves outside and removed most of the dirt; then we began cooking the leaves. I modified the process I used last year in a couple minor ways, but nothing that I expected to have dramatic effects on the outcome of the dye.
This year I also decided to take a more active role in cooling the vat as quickly as possible. So, I filled our bathtub with cold water from our well and, after the vats were ready, I put both of them into the cold water. This produced a lot more steam than last time, but it did cool the vats in under 20 minutes.
Everything went really well up until this point, but when it came time to aerate the mixture it never produced blue foam. This is is usually an important part of the process. Usually, while aerating, a green foam forms, which then turns blue before returning to green, but this time I got a whitish foam at one point. This worried me, and I began to imagine the effects of not having any blue this year …
But, the next morning a good amount of beautiful blue pigment had settled to the bottom of my jars. Over the next few days I continued decant and refilled the jars with clean water. Once clean, I poured the wet pigment into two bowls to evaporate. By week’s end all that was left were little cracked chunks of dark indigo pigment.
Conestoga Walks
photos from autumn around the village of Conestoga (click on one for more details)
With my first Local Colour pigment created, the next step in my plan read, “… a series of large-scale paintings will be created, focusing on presenting floræ …”. Since my project focused on trees, the immediate work ahead of me was to sketch as much as I can before the cold weather arrives and the trees drop all their leaves. Down on the flood plains of the village of Conestogo there are quite a few orchards that have been long since abandoned. While these trees probably don’t produce the fruit they once did when they were cared for, they have grown in very interesting ways. Apple trees have the most gnarly branches and I thought working with them would be a good place to begin.Sketching trees was new ground for me, as most of my artwork to date has drawn from the iconographic tradition. I don’t really know what I’m looking for, but hopefully my hand will find something to draw. Still I really couldn’t complain about being out in the sunshine and fresh air …
About a month into sketching trees, I began to realize that what was drawing me was a connection to my childhood memories. This revelation reminded me that the strongest connection I had to trees in my youth was to red pine trees. As a child, I spent countless hours under these trees playing, and since this project was focused on trees, I thought I should get out and sketch some pines.Going back home was too far to travel at the time, so I substituted by revisiting Sandy Hills, which is a small sandy section of crown land that feels like home. But, I wasn’t sure what kind of pine trees I could expect to find. As I walked along the trails there certainly were many species, but when I came to a little clearing, and saw that it was full of red pines, I was very excited. Spending time with these trees and their cones, needles and bark was really enjoyable.
Coming back to the studio, I spent the afternoon drawing and I then realized that these pine trees worked perfectly with the Cobalt palette I’ve developed (although I must admit that it took me the entire afternoon to come to grips with painting RED pines with only green pigment)! In the end, I think that what I have here is perfect for what I want to communicate.
Red Pine of Cobalt Painting
red pine of cobalt painting (click on one for more details)
I was feeling very focused on the Red pine tree during this time, and so I moved ahead and worked on creating the panel while I was also finalizing the drawing. The panel itself is a single slab of poplar that I cut down a few years ago. As I did with a three panel prototype I created originally, I decided to blacken the edge of the board from its natural state. But, because of the long, thinness of the pine tree prototype, I will not be joining it to any other board for this work. Once the board was chosen and planed, I set to work applying the gesso. In between coats, and both before and afterward, I continued to develop the drawing of the Red pine. I really thought it was taking shape, and I was excited to put down colours and begin painting.
Next I put down black bole and applied silver leaf to the supporting plywood board that will be lagged to the popular slab, using traditional water gilding techniques. Only an inch or two will show of this around the edges of the final painting (think of it as a kind of reverse frame). I choose to use silver, rather than the gold I usually do, because of Cobalt’s history with the metal; and I wondered if perhaps something of the green pigment from there will still resonate with it within the final painting. Once I began painting, I purposefully tried to keep large areas of the original colours apparent (for the local colour connection, etc.). Beginning with a dark background is very traditional in egg tempera painting, but I changed that in the hope of forming a connection between the black forms with the background.
Then came the struggle: Day after day was spent trying different ways of connecting the pine needles to the background. I tried a dozen different techniques, but nothing was satisfactory. I went back to my iconographic methods, and tried to integrate some of them too (I remembered that icons use an outer shape that is monolithic, and tried to incorporate that aspect – for example). After two weeks of stuggle, I realized that the work was done. It was, “done” because I was out of prepared pigment (and tired of worrying about arsenic poisoning too)! The final results were not good as painted-art and it completely failed to meet my main goal of giving a sense of place and representing my own sense of a tree. To be fair, I liked the frame, background and the original tree’s shape well enough, but the leaves, etc. were very unsatisfying.
step.2: God through Colour: “Icons of St. Barbara of Cobalt and Madoc”
This is the little, one-day, art experiment that led me into the next section of my Local Colour project. Early in the morning, while there was still a heavy frost on the ground, I went down to the Conestoga River and collected a bucket of interesting rocks (I was admiring a lot of Andy Goldsworthy images at this point). Once back in my studio I began to arrange the pebbles into what I intended to be a tree; satisfied with the results I stood back and looked again at what I had created … instead of a tree, I had created a saint!
Ultimately, my attempt to create tree paintings from Local Colour were not successful during the Fall semester. I believe that the root cause of this frustration was that I was attempting two significant changes simultaneously: A change of medium and a change of symbol. The annabergite I collected in Cobalt has no history as a pigment colour (and it’s properties were quite different from anything else I’ve every tried to paint with)! Add to this the limits I put upon myself in keeping the collected colours pure, and the difficulties with this new medium become clear.
So, I decided that it was important to focus on only one area for development. To that end I returned to the iconographic symbols that I understand, thus leaving myself free to fully explore the colours I had collected.
Madoc, Ontario
For months, Reiner and I worked on our plans to head up to look for colours within the Canadian Shield in Ontario. As the weeks passed we decided that we would head for the town of Madoc and continued to hope that the weather would cooperate. When the weekend came, the weather was fine, so we headed up. Reiner said that he knew of a little place where we could stay, but it wasn’t until we pulled up that I understood that he really meant ‘little’. The Madoc Hotel was very comfortable, clean, and the owners were nice folks, but if I was planning to spend any amount of time in the room I might have become claustrophobic! (But since I wasn’t, this wasn’t a worry.)
Firstly we headed up to the Eldorado Mine which was originally worked in 1901 for iron-hematite. In 1903, however, they found copper and continued mining for copper until 1907. Either the iron or the copper could create some great pigments, so it seemed a good place to begin. We didn’t have much trouble finding the main pit (roughly 50′ round and 75′ deep), thanks to Reiner’s GPS.
Digging into the bank on the edge of the pit was really exciting as our hammers uncovered bright yellows, reds and greens. The green was chlorite, and wouldn’t be much good for pigment, but the iron based yellows and red were wonderful finds. I read in an old article once that good yellow pigments weren’t available in North America, but there are exceptions to this for the amount a single artist needs. I can’t wait to get home and work with it!
I’ve been on trips where I spent most of my time looking for something and in the end was thankful to find anything. But, on this trip I found more than I had hoped for on the first go. So, we also decided to have a bit of fun and visit the Roger’s Mine. The Roger’s Mine was a Fluorite mine (not much good for pigment) but the crystals are beautiful and fun to collect. To get to this mine, and the Eldorado for that matter, I had to learn to drive on a new kind of ‘road’: Old railway corridors. I had little worry doing so; since these paths were built for trains I couldn’t imagine my little VW Golf being a problem. Still, when I pulled over to let an ATV by, or had to turn around, I was extra careful because I didn’t want to have to arrange for a tow truck …
I had primarily thought of this excursion as a side-trip, but we did find something of interest regarding pigments: Baryte. This mineral doesn’t have a long history as a pigment, but as an extender it does, under the name blanc fixe. I use to think that extenders only existed to make cheap paint, but of late I’ve realized that sometimes they can really improve the brushablity of a paint and even sometimes its colour. The entomology of Baryte became evident on the hike back to the car however; the word is derived from the Greek word, baryos which means ‘heavy’.
pigment harvesting from madoc (click on one for more details)
Getting back to the studio I realized that, in life, it seems to me that there are two kinds of people: Those who eat their favourite bits of supper first, and those who save best for last. I guess I belong to the latter group, because I really enjoyed the anticipation of creating the yellow ochre pigment that was collected on the trip to Madoc. These goethite rocks are the brightest yellow I’ve seen from Ontario so far, and I was very excited to see the pigment they would create. Still I enjoyed the anticipation even more, and before I created yellow pigments, I worked through all the other samples I had collected in Madoc.
In processing the goethite, my first surprise in this process was that the goethite turned out to be a coating on these rocks that was only about 1/4 of an inch thick. When I broke open a sample, the rock’s central mass became obvious and I realized that I needed to change my approach in harvesting. I had been prepared to pulverize the rocks I collected, but that would make a less bright colour, so I changed my tactics.
Instead, my assistants (aka children) and I washed the rocks by putting them into a large bucket with water and mixing them around. The water turned a bright yellow (as did the little hands that were mixing). The pigment is so fine that you can’t feel it on your hands and it acted more like a dye (although I’m sure it isn’t soluble in water, and therefore is really a pigment). Once this was done we decanted the water into another bucket, leaving the undesirable rocks behind. Then the pigment needed to settle before I could begin to remove the extra water. I also used this method to separate the finest pigment from some of the coarser later on.
After so much time spent wrestling within the narrow colour limits of the green Cobalt (not to mention the toxic impact of it) creating local colour from Madoc was a joy!
The Icons
the icons of saint barbara of cobalt and madoc (click on one for more details)
In choosing a prototype for my icons from local colour, I decided to use St. Barbara (patron saint of geologies and miners). Not that it is that important, but it took me a while to make the connection between her life and her patronage: She’s patron of miners because of the explosives they use in that profession, which are ultimately connected with the lightening that killed her father on his way home after he beheaded her …
I began my return to iconographic forms with the annabergite from Cobalt. And, even before I started I wondered whether beginning with this place and pigment was a good idea (again). It’s limited colour range and poisonous nature were both things that I found difficult; and there was a personal weight associated with it after my last attempt, of course …
Before beginning to paint, I decided to postpone things one more day and attempt to broaden the colour range of this sample through subjecting the pigment to higher temperatures than I had previously. The concern here was that these temperatures can result in the sublimation of the arsenic within the annabergite. In this case I wasn’t too concerned, as the amount was very small and I kept the kiln downwind and far away from everything, but if I ever needed to do such a thing on a larger scale I would need to set up a proper filtering system for the gases. The results weren’t much to speak of at the initial temperatures, but my last batch (and highest temperature) produced a marked change. The annabergite earth shifted toward a brown colour; and this was a very welcome addition to my palette! You can see the results in the basecoat of the flesh …
Once the first layers of paint were applied, I was struck by how much wider the range of unheated colours look on the panel (instead of on my pigment shelf in my studio). Once they’re not beside the bright ochres, vermillions, azurites of that pigment collection, their own uniqueness becomes far more apparent. In the end, I was rather pleased with how things are turning out. The green pigment presented some challenges, but these challenges have also led to creative solutions and new techniques which I will continue to use in my regular painting practice. I’ve also came a little closer to understanding what creates a good icon … as much as gestures and stance play a role in a painting being iconographic, I think that the eyes are probably central in such a work. For the Saint Barbara of Cobalt icon, I spent a whole day in executing the eyes. I think it was time well spent.
All in all, the colours from this location are much brighter than from Cobalt, and offer a naturally occurring yellow ochre and a beautiful Indian red. But, my biggest surprise came when I was frustrated to realize that I was missing a good brown colour for the icon’s hair. That night I roasted a sample of the yellow ochre in my little kiln in an attempt to create one (roasting it to a temperature that has in the past created a nice burnt sienna colour). The next morning when it had cooled I found instead a bright cinnabar red! It was an amazing experience, and I’ve named this pigment colour, Eldorado Cinabrese after the specific mine it was dug from and the brightness (and impurities) of the colour.
In order to prepare for the Winter Residency, I quickly repeated the iconographic process and painted Saint Barbara of Madoc. Here the struggle wasn’t the in form or gesture (as these were addressed in the originally Cobalt icon) but minimizing the harshness created by using brighter colours.
step.3: Artist through Colour: “Reflections on Paper and in Film”
The Transart Winter Residency was invaluable to me. While the faculty and my colleagues were supportive and interested during my critique, it became obvious that the work to-date was not generally accessible as something expressing the idea of Local Colour. The finished, painted icons were simply too opaque; some intermediate form was needed, where the creation was more directly accessible. After some deliberation, my mentor and I decided that a paper journal focused on the creation of an icon of St. Barbara would be an ideal format and that this written account would replace the online blog originally proposed within my project.
journal (Paper)
a selection of pages from my journal project (click on one for more details)
The root of both of the Saint Barbara icons I painted in my first semester was a single rock I collected at either Cobalt or Madoc, Ontario. Because this journal would be an ongoing work, and take a good deal more time in a place than the other examples, I decided to use my village of Conestoga as the source for my pigment rock.
My original plan in creating a journal was to purchase a large-format Moleskine book and work from that point; however, as fate would have it, the Moleskine company was out of stock of these large forms and so my work actually began in binding my own book. This was very beneficial for the project: It introduced me to a whole new way of seeing how pages of a book could be arranged and how page movement and manipulation could be used within a journal. Over three weeks I tore paper to size, sewed the pages and bound my journal in leather. It was a wonderful experience.
The idea of information’s accessibility is especially interesting to me and exploring the different ways in which information can be conveyed returned me to the very first proposal I had written for Transart. Given my work in how computers sort information, I wanted to represent and use some of those methods in this paper journal. In the end, I found that a blank page was an extremely freeing instance to explore how information can be presented. Here are a couple of examples of the methods I employed:
Layers of text: The words throughout the journal are presented in three different ways: Written, Printed and Penciled. Written information is in a personal voice and time-based (written chronologically, as events occur); Printed information is written in a third person voice which is factual and timeless; Penciled information is always aside comments or incomplete thoughts. Together these three modes of recording information offer different paths to interact with the journal’s topic. By carefully working out the page layout, I was able to keep each mode separate and not confused. Written information is always found in a widely margined centre section of the page and with tight line spacing; Printed information has a taller line spacing and is freer within the page; Penciled information is always limited to the pages margin.
Semi-transparent pages: I found that an effective way to include additional information without clutter was to layer semi-transparent pages within the main text. This represents the filtered approach that computers take in file-folders. After trying many different types of paper, I found a particular type of velum that worked very well for achieving this effect. A newly turned page will only show the information and photos on itself, but when pressed against the page below, additional information and clarification appears.
Moleskine Markup Language (MML): In computers, most database work is done using a system of tagging called XML (Extensible Markup Language); for the purposes of this journal I included a simplified paper-page version of this language thusly dubbed, Moleskine Markup Language. Throughout the written text, a statement such as <→24 ←8> appears in blue. This little bit of tagged information tells the reader that this topic is continued on page 24 and comes from page 8. In including this MML index throughout the journal, information becomes accessible in a threaded manner as well.
Throughout the creation of this journal it was always my intention to make sure that the story it told would be freely accessible (and I feel this has been achieved) and that the information would be made clearer, not more opaque. Using the layers of text proved to be very effective for me to include many details that I’ve never talked about before, and that created a new sense of completeness in my work.
shorts (Film)
Before the semester wrapped up, my mentor encouraged me to explore the work that had been done over this first year in a video medium. I have never done any video work, but new software programs typically comes fairly easy for me and so I dived in. Many ideas were paired into a series of tests and finally two final short films were finished. I am especially content with the second entitled, “Conestoga earth burning” as even in this new medium, I can still hear my own timbre.
“Knowing what you see.”
90 seconds
[flv width="640" height="472"]http://www.vandonkelaar.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/londonderryHunt.flv[/flv]
My first short video comes out of an awareness that Local Colour has created for me: It’s only by filtering the whole environment that this aesthetic becomes apparent. Does such filtered sight make me more clear-sighted, or am I really becoming blind to the whole? In picking out a philosophy, what have I done to those elements that don’t fit? Is my place within the environment always one of filtering what I see according to my interest (or disinterest) ..?
Regardless, I’ve had a lot of practice looking for minerals that produce good colours and this video demonstrates this ability accurately.
“Conestoga earth burning.”
110 seconds | 0 to 2100°F
[hana-flv-player video=http://www.vandonkelaar.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/burningConestogo.flv]
I think that the effect that people (including myself) have upon the environment should be seen as legitimate within the aesthetic of Local Colour. A pulverized rock might turn to a specific colour when simply applied as paint, but in many cases it will also dramatically change colour if heated. These new, burnt hues remain related to the original. This idea goes back a long time, just think of traditional colours such as Burnt Sienna and Burnt Umber! Iron based rocks are especially interesting in this process. This short video demonstrates how varied the effect of a person can be through incremental degrees of temperature change.
In this video, some mud I collected along the Conestoga river is carefully subjected to increasing heat. The card is made up of three layers of applied pigment colour (the top having only a single layer and the bottom having three) and with the left side being unsaturated and the right being saturated. Each 100°F increment is represented over 10 seconds.
Conclusion: The Red Pine of Cobalt
the finished Red Pine of Cobalt painting (click on one for more details)
Before finishing my first year at Transart, there was one more thing I had to do: Paint a pine tree. Not only was this painting at the centre of my original proposal, but day after day I entered my studio to be greeted by this failure in the corner. Although I have occasionally burned these kind of work (which is very therapeutic) in this specific case such a, “purification by fire” would have released the arsenic from the pigment into the air, having very bad effects …
It was important that I begin by removing the many layers of paint already applied to the board, so early one morning I brought the panel outside and began to carefully scrape. As layer upon layer was cut back, I remembered each particular attempt at creating my pine tree. It was both a relief and a bit of a worry to witness this: While it felt good to erase these failures, I also became more aware of how much work I had put into trying to succeed. I began to wonder if I was just setting myself up for another round of frustrating attempts.
I believe that the greatest single reason for this works success came out of the liminal space I was creating at the time through adherence to the traditional, monastic fasting and prayer observances of Orthodox monks. Once begun, there was almost no corrections or repairs needed from beginning to end. In four long days the whole work was complete, and while I was exhausted I was also very content. I had finally painted a tree that resonated spiritually, both with a specific place like Cobalt and also with my childhood memories.
While I had originally expected to create a forest of trees around the theme of local color, the task proved to be much more difficult for me that I had envisioned. But, with a single example successfully created, the seed for a whole forest exists.