From Clothlets to Bleeding Art

The sketch above was made by Anne Rippy, a woman on our sketch crawl to the Screen Door last Sunday.  She did the drawing as well as the painting right there.  I asked her if she would send me her sketch and her explanation of the mediums she used because her method of getting color onto this sketch was not only extremely handy, but also a very interesting revival of an ancient process by which colors could be stored and easily transported.  First, here's Anne's explanation:

When Anne showed us her sheets of super-pigmented tissue paper (the Spectra Bleeding Art tissue), I remembered reading a while back about a Medieval process called the making of clothlets.  I hunted around until I found my copy of Daniel Thompson's The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting,  and sure enough, on page 143 there's a discussion of clothlets, which I am quoting here at  length:

"The method of making the colour out of the seeds of the Crozophora [sunflower] is described in many medieval texts.  It was prepared. . . in the form of "clothlets," bits of [linen] cloth saturated with the juice of the seed of capsules.  The capsules were gathered in the summer, and the juice extracted from them by squeezing gently, so that the kernels, the seeds proper, were not broken, but the juice of the capsule was expressed.  When a good supply of this juice was ready, cloths were dipped into it, dried, and redipped and redried over and over, until they had soaked up a substantial amount of the colour."

Thompson goes on to explain that in some cases the cloths were first soaked in lime water in order to neutralize the natural acidity of a juice and render the color of the juice more blue.  In other cases the already-soaked cloths were then exposed to the vapors of ammonia to further increase the alkalinity and make the color more violet.

He goes on to explain that after drying, the clothlets were stored between the leaves of a book.  "Clothlets were a most convenient form of colours for illuminators.  It was only necessary to put a bit of clothlet into a dish, and wet it with a little glair [egg white] or gum water [gum Arabic, another binder] , and the colour would dissolve out of the cloth into the medium, forming a transparent stain.  A good many colours were prepared in this way for late medieval book painting, as transparent colours came to be more and more prized by the painters of miniatures.  Almost any coloured vegetable juice could be prepared in this way with at least some temporary success;  and everything possible was tried;  but the turnsole [sunflower] colours were the most satisfactory and important."  (page 143- 144)

I'm playing around with making some clothlets using the bright orange sap of a celendine poppy plant from my front garden.  Have any of you ever made paints from vegetable or mineral sources?  I'd love to hear your stories in the comments section here. 

The Strange Appeal of Headlessness

While sketching yesterday with some friends at an antique place that is NOT the Tobacco Barn, I found a lovely concrete statue of a headless Virgin Mary.  She was looking fine, stepping on that snake as usual, opening her hands to send out peaceful, calming rays.  The only thing missing was her head.  I wondered if they were selling her.  She was stuffed back in a corner behind a metal chair, and her head was nowhere in sight, not even on the floor under the chair.  But there was a tag on her, and it read "Headless Mary" with a scribbled-over price that looked like $29.  A great price!

I saw my friend over in another area, so I told her about the Mary.  She was very interested as she already has a headless Buddha and we agreed that headlessness can be a good state, sort of a No Mind, No Problem state taken to pleasant extremes.  We went back over to Mary, but this time it was clear that the price was not $29, but $59, sadly out of our reaches.

So I drew her again, and then went over to the wonderful opium bed across the room and drew it quickly, noting the translation of the Chinese characters carved over the opening:  5 Thousand Years of Prosperity and Longevity, and noting that the price has been reduced from $3800 to $3400.

Making a Coracle

Last summer Jacob, my grandson, and I decided to make a Welsh coracle, a small boat of ancient design, traditionally made of willow branches and animal hide.  We searched out directions for making it, our favorite being Francis Galton's 1860 book The Art of Travel, in which he says in step 3:  "Kill two bullocks and skin them" , with no details on that operation.  (We found newer, less grisly alternatives for the boat's skin in The Whole Earth Catalog and in several YouTubes.)  Above is Jacob seeing if the boat would float in shallow water in a small river near my house.

Above is a page from our notebook.  We first spent a lot of time finding sufficient willow to make the boat.  My friend Maggie Cheney told me about a friend of hers' pond that had willow trees growing along the banks, so we went out there with Maggie one evening last summer and trimmed around 30 long branches and brought them to my house.  We peeled all the willow and saved the bark to make willow paper, then stood the branches up to dry.  Later in the summer we had to soak the branches to make them flexible.  They were so long that we improvised a trough for soaking by lining the ditch in front of my house with a big piece of plastic and filling it with water.  After a couple of weeks the branches were flexible.

We stuck the ends of the branches in the ground in an oval shape and wove a large basket as shown in the first notebook on the right side of the page.  After the basket was secured with tarred twine at the joinings, we made a seat out of ash wood and lashed it into place.  Then last week we covered the boat frame with heavy canvas, as shown above.  We sewed it in place and then painted it with roofing tar to waterproof it.  Two coats seemed to do the job.  So then we set out for the river with the little boat tied to the roof of my VW.   The river is walking distance, but the boat was a little awkward for us to carry down a hill and along a road, so we drove.

When we got to the river we had to carry the boat down a trail until we found a good place to put it in.  Then came the big moment of seeing if it was waterproof and if it floated, and finally, if it could hold us, and most importantly, if we could balance in it.  The above photo shows Jacob enjoying the boat. 

Possibly the Definitive Mannequins?

Over the weekend I drove past the Tobacco Barn and slipped in for a few minutes to check on the mannequin.  Had she been sold?  Had someone finally rearranged her parts?  The air inside the Barn was throbbing with midsummer heat and heavy with humidity and desultory shoppers.  No one played the piano today.  Back in mannequin land at the very end of booth A-16 the lights were dim and the few people who made it back there looked more lost than on a quest.  The mannequin was in exactly the pose I had left her in last weekend.  So I thought:  She needs a better hat, something to attract people to her fun spirit.  I put a rusty red brocade lampshade with little string tassels on her head.  She looked cocquetish and sort of shy, not the look I was going for exactly, but I drew her anyway.  Her arms and legs are now in a real tangle, and they seem to be dumped behind her, leaving her armless and legless but not really upset about that.

And then I had one more idea for her:  I decided no more Easter Sunday hats or even sweet little lampshades.  What this girl needs is a jaunty bucket on her head and a Girl Scout songbook!  With no arms and legs she has lots of free time.  So she's resting against her legs and using her arms to prop up her songbook.  I sketched her quickly on tea-stained paper in a different notebook and decided to keep the brighter background.  She's sailing away from her tangled, confined life!  She loves going to sea in a tub with a bailing bucket on her head!  "In yonder gre-e-en val-leys where stream-le-ets me-e-an-der...."

Eva G. commented that this mannequin series might want to become a children's book.  I like the idea very much of taking her further.  Definitely a series of prints, maybe an artist's book, maybe a children's book-- anyone else have ideas? 

More Fun With Mannequins

I had an irresistable urge to go revisit the mannequin in the tub at Tobacco Barn this weekend.  I wondered if she would even be there-- certainly I would have bought her if I would have had the $145.  She is, after all, a "hard to find teenager", and even if her tub comes for an additional $25 and her hat yet more-- still, I would imagine someone would have snapped her up.  But no.  No one had even rearranged her!  She was still lounging in the tub looking slightly crazy.  So this time I did it.  Very carefully I handled her fragile limbs and gave her a more adventuresome pose.  Then I drew her from two angles.  She now looks to me like she's paddling her tub- boat in a rough sea!  What a devil-may-care girl she is!  She has a sticky piece of something fluffy on the back of her hand, but that's not stopping her.

Mannequin in a Tub: Another Report from the Edge

Yesterday afternoon five of us ventured into the Tobacco Barn, braving 90 degree heat and humidity and armed with sketchbooks and water bottles.  The Tobacco Barn is way too big to have air conditioning, but they have enormous rattly fans in strategic locations, which add to the atmosphere of another time period.  I went looking for a cool spot to park and found this great tub 'o' mannequin parts at the end of a dark row of things.

The mannequin wears a sign around her neck on a piece of red yarn;  it says "Fragile!  Nice complete vintage mannequin.  Pants fit nicely.  Hard to find teenager.  $145"  She also wears a perky straw and plastic fruit Easter Sunday church hat from the fifties complete with a net (were these nets called whimseys?) that creeps down over her forehead.  Her eyes are a little strange and her teeth are extra white next to her painted lips.  Best of all her limbs have been detached and tossed in the tub with her!  What fun she seems to be having without any arms and with her legs playfully sticking out!

(The drawing I did with a black waterproof Pilot V-Ball pen on willow and abaca paper.  I added watercolor when I got home.)

Wamboldtopia Sketch Crawl

Today the journal group that I'm in had its first sketch crawl.  We had heard about a private garden called Wamboldtopia (Wamboldtopia.com) near BookWorks (www.AshevilleBookWorks.com) that had been under growth and change for ten years, the masterwork of Damaris and Ricki Pierce.  The day was sunny and warm, and the garden is actually located near a fairly busy section of town;  but as soon as we passed under the stone archway entrance, we felt like we were in a cool, shady, hidden part of Italy, Bomarzo with its ancient sculpture garden, or an undeveloped and rarely -visited section of a forgotten hill town.

I like to notice what my eye is drawn to, and I kept finding myself parked in front of the several old-tombstone-like skull pieces that were made by Damaris and embedded in stone columns or walls made by Ricki. 

For my final drawing I did the tower (which is really a clever disguise of a chain-link fence at the property line-- pieces of insulation foam wrapped in hardware cloth covered with stucco with a real bell included and the fence top made to look like the top of a stone wall) and a poppy seed head, which reminded me of the skull pieces;  so I concocted my own poppy-head skull exploding its seeds. 

While at the garden I did pen sketches only and made color notes.  Later this evening I painted with watercolor and gouache and incorporated a few rubber stamps that I had on hand from another project.  The paper in this sketchbook is handmade from willow bast and abaca.