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collecting
initials
 

teeny
cross 
stitches
marking

kerchiefs
gloves
mittens
dresses

sure
footed

semblance
of order

circles & lines
circles of chair tape

a whole made  a circle from
a row of chairs

chair tape in the textile collection of the Shaker Museum

circles for today’s flower moon

sky blue azure cobalt
night twilight blue periwinkle
forget me not blue
a blue for the clouds to set against
a theory of blue
blueness happiness elation
a view to another realm
blue sky was early born
blue azure turquoise cobalt cereulean
blue was brought of sea crushed stone
worth more than gold
blue sky mirrors matters
blueness azure cobalt blue sky
upturned sky gaze
seen from space sky
globe of sky blue
blue sky blue


A response to Lucy Ive’s prompt, ‘chroma no. 242’ written on Sunday at The Clark Art Institute. 

If you follow along here, you well know I adore the sky and blue.  Clouds or not. Sunrise and sunsets.  

Thanks Lucy and congratulations! 

today I’m setting the table for
my friend’s indigo dyeing class
studio visit
 
walking around the table so many to thank,
including--
-india flint at haystack for her ecoprinting class 
-norte maar & Jason Andrew for showing ‘a year’s worth’
-and later bewilder work with catalog
-everyone that taught & talked to me about natural dyes
-working at Naumkeag with their amazing flower gardens
-being a TA for Kathy Hattori at Haystack and dyeing with
            so many talented dyers
-learning that Shakers wore ‘any color they could dye’ as 
            an artist in residence at Hancock with Smp
-showing not once but twice with like-minded artists
            interested in the Shakers, organized by Albany airport & Eric
-performing meetinghouse with miram at a moonbow event
and later eal publishing it and then adding a podcast
-working with curator Christie Jackson & all at Fruitlands on
‘anything but drab’
 
often one thing leads to another
oftentimes it's just someone’s faith in your work
or just willing to say yes to something never done
but always, I am filled with so much gratitude to all.
Thank you. 

what is poetry?
how does one revise?
how does one make a manuscript?

emily dickinson said, “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.  These are the only ways I know it.  Is there another way.”
[letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson]

i’m playing a poetry game
rearranging words
moving about sentences
reading chanting aloud
working with Heather McKay Young is serious &fun
color charts the way

reading and writing with mrs merrifield


a full bloom bestowed

like rust of salt

yellow past like amber

froth from the sea

blew dry smalt


.

On Saturday 21 March, please join me at 
The Slade School of Art’s 
Colour & Poetry: A Symposium VIII
free registration HERE

I’ll be reading three new poems
gleaned from recent research at
Historic Deerfield Memorial Library--
works/translations of Mrs Merrifield, 
Isaac Newton and other colour writers.
.

[images from Syme’s “Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours’ found in the Stephen L. Wolf Collection at Historic Deerfield Library]

[Brece Honeycutt, reading & writing with mrs merrifield {graphite, tea, gouache, watercolor on paper}, featured in the online exhibition, The Nomenclature of Colours, The Slade School of Art]

[listen  here via Soundcloud to hear me read,  ‘reading & writing with mrs merrifield']

“a book is a small building”*
 
 
 
within
folds
structures
 
a village
unfolds
 
utopian
colors
collide
 
into a
spectrum

book spines at Historic Deerfield during color research Fellowship using the Stephen L. Wolf Collection. 

grids
graininess
bursts of color

books bound in
libraries
color found on
crepe paper folds

excerpts from yearly
visit with friend

Yale Center for British Art: Painters Ports & Profits
Yale University Art Gallery
Beinicke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Chirimen Books

look alikes

color blots
from Martha Gartside
tangled threads
from mending projects

crimson blot colours:
palest pink
deepest crimson
violet blue hues
purple rose
rose-leaf green
yellow seeds of rose

violet blot colours:
common crocus
purple lilac
deep purple lilac
palest green yellow
orange full tinted

An excerpt from my upcoming essay Prismatic Utopia on Gartside.  And please note the footnotes, for none of this examination of Gartside would have been possible without the scholarship of Dr. Alexandra Loske.



Martha Gartside (1755-1819), a British watercolor instructor and theorist, wrote three instruction books, including her 1808 An Essay on a New Theory of Colours. Perhaps, the earliest nineteenth century woman to write and publish on both the theory and practical aspects of color, she insisted her pupils needed a command of color theory in order to become practicing artists. [1] Of course, Gartside constructed a color wheel, but her inventive ‘color blots’ showed both range and contrast and could rightly be the first abstracted painted image. She explained, “each blot is a group of flowers…They are merely compact blots of colours, exhibiting the effect produced by arranging them according to the theory delivered.”[2] Her orange blot features the harmony of deep orange and scarlet nasturtiums contrasted with the “darkest shade of blue and darker green leaves.” [3] The blot glows golden as the sun on a horizon, grounded by deep red rocks and blue-black indigo waves or as she would have it, orange nasturtiums with deeply colored leaves.

[1] M.Gartside, An Essay on A New Theory of Colours, (London: T. Gardiner: 1808). Internet Archive, accessed January 2023. https://archive.org/details/gri_33125015119437/page/n3/mode/2up.  If one wants to read a concise and illustrative book on color theory and painting, there is no better than Gartside.  For an examination of Gartside herself, see Alexandra Loske, Mary Gartside c. 1755-1819, Abstract Visions of Colour:  A Woman Theorist in Georgian England, (London: Thomas Heneage Art Books:  2024).  Since writing this book, Loske has determined Gartside’s first name was Martha instead of Mary.
[2] Gartside, 45.
[3] Gartside, 50-51.

roster of reds
recently read
ranges of russet
selections of scarlet
swatches of silk

books from Memorial Library, Historic Deerfield
Shaker objects & textiles, Shaker Museum
.


—Maerz Dictionary of Color
—cupboard over drawers
-Syme, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours
—Shaker Sister Kneckerchief
—Jorgensen Mastery of color
—Shaker oval box
—Chevreul, Des Couleurs
—Shaker survey tool
—The Practical Decorator, George Audsley & Maurice Audsley
—Shaker Sister Neckerchief
—Munsel Book of Color
—Colors, what they are and what to expect of them

all in line
aligned

midnight blue
dove grey
forest green
petal pink
crimson coral
 
I’ve cited
I’ve cleaned
i’ve imagined
I’ve inventoried
 
colors in Dorothy cloaks
colors in poetry manuscripts
 
 
image  Dorothy cloaks Shaker Museum
       Prismatic Utopia, poetry manuscript

color collected:
Stephen L. Wolf Collection
Memorial Library, Historic Deerfield
 
……………………………………

color    as       pie charts
                  dots blots
 
color    as       time keepers
                  palette makers
 
color    as       gridded groups 
                  accented accidents
 
color    as       prism percussions
                  regulated registers
            
color    as       absolute attributes
		  sequenced saturations
                        
color    as       consumer consensus
                  compasses quandaries 
                                                            
color    as       faceted philosophies
		  fascinating phenomena
                        
color    as       tangents into treatises
		  notions into nomenclatures
 
		  color collected


……………………………………………………………


—Munsel, Munsel Book of Color
—Rimington, The Art of Mobile Colour
—Chevreul, Chevreul on Colors
—Chevreul, Des Couleurs
—Hay, Nomenclature of Colours
—Hitchcock, Religion of Geology
—Birren, Color for Interiors
—Field, Field’s Chromatography for Artists
—Gaspard, Theorie des couleurs
—Bustanoby, Principles of Color Mixing
—Walch, Color Source Book
—Jones, Grammar of Ornament
—The Painter’s Handbook
—Wolf Flow Colors, Wolf & Son’s Paints


………………………………………………………………

Thanks Memorial Library/Historic Deerfield for fruitful fabulous fellowship to examine the Stephen L Wolf color book collection. 

NOTE: Application deadline for the 2026/7 Memorial Library Fellowship due April 3, 2026