Into the Blue

Interlude

Notes and photographs from a week in blue.

Indigo, lapis, dark smalt, Egyptian blue, cerulean, cobalt blue, French ultramarine, and pthalo blue back row, at the tower studio, Cowdray Castle ruins this week.

Obtaining ultramarine from lapis lazuli is like finding one’s true vocation. It takes time and sometimes arduous refinement. The results can be murky at first, in need of clarification.

Pure natural lapis lazuli rock in the brass pestle and mortar after being boiled in vinegar, before many hours of pounding and grinding. You can see a cotton thread from the muslin cloth used to wrap it up while smashing.

This week under the instruction of maestro David Cranswick, we transformed something hard and rough, jangling satisfyingly in a bag, into the soft blue flour of the robes of the Queen of Heaven.

Yet another embodied metaphor for my organism to fall in love with. T’ai Chi, tanning hides, grinding stones - I don’t know why the quicker crafts draw me in less, but days spent in the thick of these three temper me in ways no easily-won result can match.

Ruth Gaskovski

asked people what anachronistic, done-the-old-way things we cleave to, which make our lives better and keep us rooted, healthy and connected to each other and real life. Pigment-making is high on my list. ‘Do not be conformed to this world’ for me includes the collection, transformation and refinement of rocks into beautiful colours with which to paint. One can walk into a shop, or use the internet and buy almost any colour under the sun. But to spend my entire learning budget for the year in five days to study a method with which to make a translucent blue that I don’t even use in my art takes a certain kind of commitment to mineral colour. One I did not quite know I had so deeply, until this week.

The studio in a hexagonal tower of an otherwise ruined castle in Sussex, England.

The chemistry enthusiast in me prepares a list of experiments for next winter with which to assay, and hopefully perfect, the ancient methods. So much was left only implied or entirely unrecorded through the ages, but a grasp of pH, saponification and metal salts leads me towards answers secreted in the lacunae in the written Renaissance methods.

Coarse, relatively pure pigment drying after 4 days processing.

In my heart, the blue pan sits like the promise of a glorious night sky over the whole world, one un-split by bombing raids and unscratched by drones. I grind the cloudy wet pigment in the mortar, washing it of dirt and pyrites. I am rarely up for purity, except in pigments. Let me place this mysterious blue against red earth and shell gold, it is not meant to sit alone.

Pigments are like people, they of the earth, made for relationship, for conveying meaning, to be alongside one another and thereby make each other shine. We are complementary, analogous, harmonising. We are part of the bigger picture. Sometimes we sing.

The walk to class each morning, across the meadow.

I tell my teacher the ancients waited a very long time to name blue. Black, white and red always came first, the world over. Blue was the ‘colour of lapis’, not an abstract term, but a finger pointing to a rock, veined with gold, brought along the trade routes from Afghanistan. The stones we used this week were a gift from the daughter of a man who closed his lapis mine, rather than allow the Taliban to gain its treasure.

This week, ‘natural’ didn’t mean ‘simple’. ‘Pure hand-purified mineral pigment made by the Fra Angelico method’ doesn’t mean ‘comes with a sweet, reassuring story’. I am absorbed in the complexity and spend hours mulling over how I can source waste, broken jewellery and off-cut old lapis to obtain an ethical source for future pigment creation. To desire only the colour but not attend to the consequences would be to forge another tiny blade for the laceration of beauty from within.

Pigment putties made from natural gums and waxes in various stages of refinement during the washing process, by which the stone matrix dust stays bound and the pure blue is washed into soda-ash water. Here you can see pure ultramarine gathering in the creases of my hand.

As I ride the train home, blue descends through the Hampshire sky, still gold on the western horizon, with lapis-ash creeping at the east. The chalk of the Winchester cutting always delights and the tenacity of shrubs clinging onto pure pigment slopes encourages me. Ragweed shouts from the sidings in bright yellow while elderberries hang above in wine-dark clusters.

Everywhere I look I see blue: the train seats, a woman’s jeans, an elderly lady’s pretty chintz dress, the new flats’ wall, a dumpster, scaffolding poles. Eastleigh’s buses are blue.

Lydia Catterall

tells me blue shades signalled forbidden colours of love in nineteenth century Britain. A ribbon here, a button there, an entire hidden world kept simultaneously veiled and revealed by the jay’s plumage.

Blue emerges from the murky depths of many hours of patient putty washing, rinsing and sieving.

David Benjamin Blower

, dressed in a shirt of pale blue stripes, sings songs of joyous solidarity: ‘occupy the bandstands!’ Followed up by excoriating deep blues of exile and of seeking refuge on Europa’s Shores. Later, alone for 20 minutes, I watch the sky darken behind towering ash trees from the hammock. I praise the ashes for not yet succumbing to dieback. To lay under their ferny silhouettes for another summer is everything I need after the concentrated blues of voice and guitar in service of connexion.

In a blue painted Sea Scout hall on Sunday I shared taichi with my old classmates and felt the joy that bubbles up unbidden: knowing, these are my people too. The animals we are wish to move together like this. I thank the many-limbed being that is twenty-four people breathing and stepping in concert, using their awareness and peripheral vision to stay synchronised. Such different classrooms, so much sentient matter, animated by spirit.

Swatching watercolours made from all the blues in the studio so as best to see and record the contrast between natural and synthetic blues on paper.

And now, I step into the blue of an unimaginable future, past the palest indigo of ebbing tide at Southampton Water, soon to cross the dark Stour, and on to home at dusk. A tiny lozenge of lapis, the Solent in the distance, seen from my kitchen window, awaits my return. I will greet that beloved oblong view in the morning, the focus of my yearning each day, the direction to which I address my prayers to the Great Mystery.

Different grades of lapis beside my colour notes, which will form the basis of future experiments in the winter.

One more sleep and then into the blue again, into the silent water, once in a lifetime…

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This week’s good thing: rather obviously, the lapis lazuli workshop with David Cranswick with whom I previously studied ‘Alchemy of Colour’ four years ago. The deep conviviality in the studio with the other two students was a joy, thanks to Ran and Merv for taking some photos of me at work with the materials, two of which are featured above. David’s expertise with the method and his openness to my (frequent) questions and chemical research made for a great week of learning. If you have an artist in your life who would appreciate a week in a castle approaching the topic of alchemy, surrounded by good copies of old master paintings, then your Christmas present to them is now sorted.

Movement Workshop news: I’ll be sending a reminder for next Saturday’s online movement workshop to all paid subscribers later in the week. You can subscribe for just one month to access the link, or if you can’t afford to do so but really want to come along, just let me know by replying to this email and I will comp you 6 months for free.

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