Arvo Pärt — Spiegel im Spiegel.
Ten minutes. Put it on before you open the door to your studio. You'll understand why.
I did not choose Prussian Blue. Prussian Blue chose me. It arrived in a Daniel Smith tube, uninvited, part of a set I bought in a moment of weak resistance at an art supply store in Portland, ME, three winters ago. I didn't want it. I had blues. I had too many blues. I was a cobalt / ultramarine woman, a phthalo loyalist. And then I squeezed out this dark, slightly threatening thing, diluted it to almost nothing, and it sat on the paper like a bruise becoming a sky. A bruised sky; a poem somewhere, I'm sure.
Now I use it in almost everything. It shows up the way important things do: you don't remember deciding, you just notice they're there.
This is what pigment does when it's good. It has opinions. Almost patronizes you.
I allow.
What I read this week
On the left: American version, on the right: Catalan. Can you believe they did this to us?!
I've been sitting with Maggie Nelson's Bluets again — a book I return to the way you return to a particular corner of a particular museum because the light is always right there, windows are the size of your whole house, and someone else must be cleaning them often. Bluets are ostensibly about blue. It's really about desire and attention and how we survive loss by making things. 229 propositions about a color. I want to write a book like that about water. Maybe I already am, just not in that form yet.
I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.
Watch the interview with Maggie:
What I love this week
— two things, because I cannot help myself
Daniel Smith Watercolor — 5ml Tubes.
I have tried a lot of paints. Student grade, artist grade, boutique European brands in tiny precious pans. Daniel Smith and another brand (soon) is where I landed and have stayed for a long time. The pigment load is serious — a little goes a long way, and the granulation on certain colors (Lunar Black, Bloodstone Genuine, the whole Primatek line) is so particular it feels like the paper itself grew texture. The 5ml tubes are my format: enough to work freely, small enough not to hoard. I keep a core palette of twelve and let the others in slowly, one at a time, to see if they mean it. In a few, I'll be sharing more about granulation because it is MAGIC.
Meeden 18-Well Watercolor Palette.
The sexy recommendation. No one writes poems about palettes. But a good palette shapes how you mix, and this one — white porcelain, generous wells, easy to clean — does something simple right: it gets out of the way. The white surface shows you the true color before it hits paper. That matters more than you'd think. I've abandoned fancy palettes in favor of this one, and my mixing is faster and cleaner for it.
Other Internet Love plucked from the Garden of e-Delights:
- Color: A Natural History of the Palette — Victoria Finlay's book is old, and I'm still recommending it. Every color has a story that involves war, or accident, or obsession. Get the audiobook (linked.)
- James Gurney on mixing grays — one of the most useful painting blogs alive. He posts quietly and consistently, which I respect enormously.
- The Handprint watercolor site — ugly as 1999, useful as anything. The most complete reference on watercolor pigments on the internet.
What I'm working on, studio bits.
New Bloomlands pieces, still wet on the board. I'm thinking about size this month — whether the intimacy of a small painting is the same intimacy as a large one, or whether scale changes what a painting can say. Probably it does. I'm testing this with my hands rather than my theory. Results in the new releases.
I work in whatever mediums I like. I like the idea of democratizing art and not being snobby about it. — Kara Walker
