When an
art student at Pratt Institute, I used to buy a wonderful India
Ink by Higgins called "Eternal Black", using it
with old fashioned pens with removable nibs one dipped into the ink, messy yet
yielding bold lines and a certain drama. The Eternal ink was exactly
that: very profoundly black, yet it could provide a variety of washes - from
softest cloud grey to the deep rounded shadows of the nighttime sky. But
now I've come to love the Pigma pen, permanent ink, easily transportable, and
ranging from size #005 (a very slender line) to the largest, the
#8. With the ink source always black, I have also stayed
with watercolor in small tubes, in early years always buying Winsor &
Newton paint, now finding another favorite: Schminke. (I was pleased
to read on Schminke's website that Oskar Kokoschka was a customer of theirs a
century ago.) As to the colors I buy, it has
always been Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Yellow, Ultramarine Blue and
Prussian Blue…from these four coming every possible permutation, this
despite the large number of rare and special pigments, whose names often have
an innate poetry about them: Naples Yellow, the "Lakes" (mauve-like
colors said to be "fugitive", or susceptible to light), Burnt
Sienna, and one bringing to mind the favorite red in many a
Toulouse Lautrec painting: Vermilion.
So
with just my favorite four tubes, and a couple of Pigmas, I can travel
forth on trains or a jaunt from my car to the harbor here in Branford, needing
only a nice watercolor pad and some old and favorite brushes (Chinese brushes
that are very simple yet with a kind of brush-intelligence about
them) and I am completely happy, no need for easels or turpentine or
canvasses, just the small world of a page that can hold a wide sea on it,
or the stretching sky or a bunch of leaning tree branches.
Over
the years, I've done many ink drawings, storing them in archival boxes so
they are clean and pristine until the time when it feels as though a
particular one could bloom forth with color. Then I take out
watercolor tubes and my favorite Chinese brushes, feeling a slight
unease at the outset, like a cook about to do a familiar recipe but
with some trepidation, and find myself enjoying what happens when
water and paint encounter one another. Like a rhododendron bud holding its
color within until time and warm weather release it, there
seems color implicit in an image even while still black lines on
paper. First, a sparkling mix of water and paint, then a fluxing as
color swims in the water and starts to dry, taking on a
shape not designated by me exactly but influenced by chance as the water
dries. The result, then, is a surprise: something has “hatched.” The artist, who thinks to
be in control of the process, has collaborated with another creature
entirely: nature!
More to come, of ink drawings and color thereon...
