The Oblique Hermitage

Art and science meet at home

Bone ash and rabbit skin glue on the slab to make a 15th century recipe for silverpoint ground

Here are fragments and musings from a week at the word loom, pigment slab, and conversations with good friends, as it’s a between-essays week.

The oblique hermitage

I have been grinding bone ash, marble dust, chalk, oyster shell white and ochre into various binders: gum Arabic, aquafaba, linseed oil, gum tragacanth, cherry tree gum, oat gruel… My cunning plan, to one day wean people off plastic marker pens when they see how great metal marks made on prepared grounds can look: bold, permanent, soft, shiny, grey, black, brown, golden… And so I mull things over on the slab while listening to this and this. The work is long and full of haptic richness, smashing, grinding, milling, then long strokes of the brush as I lay the grounds down on watercolour paper before making test marks on them next week. Shop-bought grounds are expensive and often made of acrylic (microplastics which go straight down the plughole, which is where the sea starts…) Tapping the sieve to let the yellow ochre through just enough to tint the various subtle whites. The splash of water droplets from a pipette before scooping them up with a palette knife on the speckled granite slab, a 1990s placemat from the charity shop.

On the other side of the kitchen I wash my hands then make stew from venison given me by a friend who suddenly finds she cannot eat it, due to a new allergy. Dumplings form from seasoned flour made into a stiff paste. The stew thickens, I turn back to the last white to be handled today: badger-dug chalk, crushed in a pestle and mortar, and sieved before forming pastels from a thick mixture. My hands say, ‘Ah, thank you, yes, no keyboards until later.’ My feet say, ‘We have been stood here all day, may we take a rest?’

Reading Cenini’s 15th Century instructions for bone white, ‘Take the thigh or wing bones of chicken or capon which have been thrown under the table…’

There being no hunting dogs here, nor any bones under my table, I obtained bone ash from a potters’ supplier, (as authentic bone China is made with it), at 1/25 the price of buying it from an art supplier.¹ This is a favourite pass-time of mine, taking materials, methods, metaphors and formulae from one context to another: cookery, pottery, geology, art, archaeology, crafts. Always the go-between, Mercury, never settling. It leads to greater inclusivity for my students. Art is for all, not just the wealthy.

I am happy bobbing in the waste stream. On the kitchen window sill, storm tossed oyster shells and cuttle fish bones become white pigment fizzing in citric acid that I normally use to make cordials. Tomorrow’s lunch eggshells will follow them. There is no end to the possible transformations.

Energy used as time, heat, or pulverisation. For instance, if you want to use low heat but have speedy times then you need to create fine particles.

I suddenly recall Mrs Monk, my dear chemistry teacher from school, smiling, hydrolysing water to oxygen and hydrogen: the squeaky pop! Catalysis, the platinum-coated cathode and anode. The immense capability in her hands and mind. She left a career running a bauxite smelting factory, to come and teach us southern girls in her lilting northern accent, a novelty.

Directly upstairs, Ms Pascoe-Griffey and Mrs Matthews, in the art department above the chemistry labs, warmed the kiln for our pots, prepared the screens for prints and laid out their own gouaches for the month-long detailed paintings I liked to do every lunchtime, of classic still-life set ups. Alizarin crimson. The name still conjures deep red velvet behind an earthenware jug.

Both classrooms, full of hundreds of deeply satisfying hours of paying rapt attention to the real. Today that same deep peace descended in my tiny kitchen, in the blessed process, an admixture of art and science (which are in no way opposed, both being creative endeavours). Stir, crush, brush, assess, make notes, adjust.

Bless you, Mrs Monk, for showing me a woman’s place is in her lab.

A diagram can even deliver a joke

The universal set

A wonderful Valentine’s night spent talking over Zoom with author and campaigner Anthea Lawson. Many Venn diagrams and ‘you can only have two of the three sides’ triangles were drawn, around life, art, activism and relationship. Anthea had seen my earlier ones here and wanted to see if it applied in her realm too. The best new triangles will pop up in our next books, in our wonderfully different contexts. I find diagrams a useful way to think about seemingly intractable things.² Much laughter and deep conversation. We plan a podcast when our books are written. Well, we shall see.

Does anyone recognise this asparagus-like shrub, photographed last week? It looks like it will make good basketry material.

All summer down the beach

I don’t use AI in making art or writing. But after rereading

Hadden Turner

’s piece on authenticity, I find the transcription and audio editing tool I have used for a year does indeed use AI. I don’t use it for creating any audio, only removing gaps, coughs, ums and fluffed lines. But still, there it is.

AI has no play. It is instrumental. When you use it, it is using you. That’s not the same as play within a culture. Cheating, collaboration, shame, thrill, loss, risk, fun, rules, what can be got away with, what can be salvaged, absorption, winging it. None of that is algorithmic, it is the syntax of socialisation, a form of bonding / grooming according to David Fleming. All the places we once played, out of sight and earshot of others, out of contact until dinner time, or the end of the holidays, no one surveilling us, is how we became humans of our culture. If one only plays on screens, one becomes accustomed into the culture of the Machine. Which is to say, there are no customs, nor any culture, only means and outcomes.

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I am drawing a word for Lent each day and posting them in Substack Notes

Mass

I find that Joy has the same weight as water, and is as true a source of buoyancy, as long as I don’t try to grasp at it.

This week’s good thing: is weird but good… mouth taping with ordinary first aid medical tape. It’s six months since I started placing an inch of tape over my mouth at night so that I don’t breathe through my mouth if I turn over onto my back. Well, my friends reading this will already be laughing, imagining something like Zippy. Yes, I am now perfectly quiet from 11pm until 7am. Miracles never cease.

It’s genuinely changed my life for the better. From puberty to menopause I could always ‘sleep for England’. It was my super-power unless I had had a glass of wine, which would always block my nose and case me to snore. Then with the change, came many changes, one of which was disturbed sleep and turning over lots in the night. Lying on my back, my mouth would sometimes fall open and I would end up with a very dry throat, waking up frequently to have sips of water, further disturbing my sleep. Travelling so much also took a toll, unfamiliar beds, sounds and temperatures. I tried sleep aids, but they didn’t help.

My brother told me about this and I laughed but I had cured my youthful asthma and allergies without drugs, by changing physical household and personal habits, so I was keen to have a go. After an initial 3 days with it feeling odd, I suddenly had no more sore throats, dry mouth, and no need to wake when on my back, meaning much more restful sleep all round. No snoring at all. My teeth and gums are also much healthier, which is the well-documented beneficial effect of proper amounts of saliva in the mouth, (something my pioneering dentist bangs on about endlessly). And my nose is always unblocked, with no colds so far this winter at all, which is unheard-of, before now. Anyway, that’s what’s happened for me. You can decide for yourself by searching ‘mouth taping’. I don’t have any shares in micropore tape companies!

Posting health-related things like this doesn’t happen often, but it was just too beneficial not to share. I think 6 months testing is enough to know that I will continue indefinitely. The worst that can happen is that your housemate, spouse, children, or your own self in the mirror will have a good old laugh at you. But you will be the last one laughing when you wake up bright eyed and bushy tailed, as I do now.

1. Your fine old tea set is likely not pure Vegan-friendly. I read these days some substitute artificial calcium oxide for the residue of bones baked at 1000 degrees C.

2. From the Latin, in - not, and tractare draw, pull, handle, discuss.