swifts chair backs painted pages dippers buckets Brethren workshop stair wells and walls & a former Shaker Office building
‘anything but drab’ opens inside that yellow office building on May 1 at Fruitlands Museum
[swifts, chair back, dipper and bucket Shaker Museum | New Lebanon; book page from 'Shaker Furniture Makers' by Jerry Grant & Douglas Allen; Brethren's Workshop and stairs Enfield Shaker Museum; former Harvard Shaker community office structure now at Fruitlands Museum]
21 March marks World Poetry Day & International Color Day
The Shaker Sisters at Harvard MA recorded coloring (they wrote collouring) in their Journal. Coloring meant dyeing. Dyeing is making color. Dyeing is possibility.
This poem uses text from their Journal and will be part of an upcoming exhibition, ‘anything but drab’ at Fruitlands opening in May.
we collour
we color scarlet on stormy days
we color indigo when we are indefatigable
we color butternut roses blooming abundantly
we color prusy blue pick some pease
we color logwood smelling lilacs
we color fancy blue to match azure skies
we color slate silk with sicily sumac to match slanted rain
"Imagine. Colours of the past, escaping from the pages of old dye and pattern books. Persian blue, Raven, dainty blue, pomegranate flower, spiny lobster, winesoup, dove breast, golden wax, grass green, green sand, rotten olive, modest plum, agate...finding their way to streets of our cities, enlivening all we wear, all allied to dissipate the bleakness of the times."
From Dominique Cardon's introduction to 'The Dyer's Handbook Memoirs on Dyeing by a French Gentleman-Clothier in the Age of Enlightenment' [Oxbow Books, 2016, pgs xi-xii]
+technicolor additions to Edward Deming Andrews text about dyes used by the Shakers at Watervliet
thanks Josef Albers “Why colored paper instead of pigment and paint”
-paper provides innumerable colors -sources are easily accessible (HTSI magazine) --makes an inexpensive paper ‘palette’ -unnecessary mess, quick easy juxtaposition --no spoiled or paint mixing failures --no big equipment, but paste and cutter --no drying time --ease of solving problems
[from Josef Albers, ‘Interaction of Color: 50th Anniversary Collection,’ Yale University Press 2013, pgs. 6-7]
looking for brightneess in rainbows and revision structures on hand knit shawls dyed with goldenrod, gathered at wasteplaces stitched into circles emanating sunlight
a small handheld book folded from one sheet of Fabriano paper holds colors within a greyed horizon --
“So mountains are languages and languages are mountains.” Etal Adnan from 'Surge’
To live at the horizon becomes larger than mountain & sky
where poems reside
on lichen lined limbs within sodden forest floors on mountains, in valleys in between clouds and sky
color from the valley the greyed sky the pelting rain dawn dusk
Thank you Monika Sosnowsk and Peter Dudek for inviting me up to Bascom Lodge for a swell day of looking, painting and writing. Thanks to the dinner guests that listened while I read Anne Carson, Ada Limon, Thoreau and a few of my poems.
[images of residency book, early orange dawn sky, atop the memorial tower, the valley, the lodge, the rain at the end of the day]
