Sunrise
Wild Blue Yonder
Small Worlds of Color
Let the Water Hold Me Down
Watching the Days Go By
Into the Blue Again
Periwinkle
from Katy Kelleher writing in The Paris Review, Aug 19, 2020: Periwinkle, the Color of Poison, Modernism, and Dusk
Getting It Wrong
i rushed through this exercise because of an impending thunderstorm, and (quite obviously) didn’t get the colors right. what to do? slow down. look carefully. try again.
this is the time of year when new mushrooms and other fungi appear overnight. i will get another shot at it.
i am curious, though. the mushrooms i find usually have bites taken out of them by mice and squirrels. the cluster i pulled these from was untouched. why was it avoided? i washed my hands carefully after handling.
Bombardiers in the Trees
at first light the red squirrels ascend to the tops of the conifers. they are busy harvesting ripe green pine cones which they drop onto the metal roof of our camp. (bam! bam! bam! no one here sleeps late in august.) later in the day, they scurry around collecting their treasure to store in their middens for winter food. a midden is a central hoard that is easy to defend from competitors and provides a moist, cool environment that prevents cones from opening.
all this scrambling around in the trees results in other debris ending up on the ground, in this case, immature white cedar berries and leaves, the subject of today’s color study.
Same Colors, Different Paper
thirty-five years ago i took my first watercolor class. the instructor gave us a list of essential colors and had us purchase tubed paints. fast-forward to winter of twenty-twenty when i rediscovered these old paints in a cookie tin at the back of a closet. they were hard as rocks, and my first impulse was to drop them all in the bin and kiss them goodbye.
but – being ever frugal – i wondered if they could be reconstituted. using pliers and tin snips i peeled the metal tubes off the hardened paint. using hammer and chisel i broke the paints into shards, which i placed into ice cube trays with a little vegetable glycerin and a few drops of distilled water. every night before bed i gave each well a gentle stir. eventually they became soft enough to transfer to half pans in a travel palette.
today i laid out the yellows and reds and created a few mixtures, comparing the difference in resulting color on two different papers. on the left, one-hundred-forty-pound cold pressed, and on the right, one-hundred-ten-pound card stock.
Walking on Paint 