a collection. a survey

Date : April 14, 2025
a collection of yellows
a survey of yellowed


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]


reds yellows oranges

Date : April 2, 2025
Madder Red
Crimson Red
Scarlet Crimson
French Plum
Beetroot Red
Spiny Lobster
Barnwood Red
Peachwood Red

Fast Yellow
Woollen Yellow
Bark yellow
Gold Yellow
Dead Leaf Yellow
Ochre yellow
Lemon Yellow
Green Yellow

Orange yellow
Pale Orange
Apricot Orange
Tumeric Orange

we color

Date : March 22, 2025
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
 
we color blue spirits for drab woolens
 
we color cochineal pink roses
 
we color purple standard
 
we color considerable


an accord

Category : Art, Books, Color, research, Shakers
Date : February 19, 2025
a scheme of colours

a tree of love, a tree of life

a book unfolds, an accordion, an accord

a work in progress for Fruitlands Museum

ROYGBIV

Category : Art, Books, Color, Shakers
Date : February 17, 2025

sun drifting into rooms
onto walls gleaming with varnish
onto chrome yellow cabinets
onto reddish yellow floors
 
warmth emanates
energizing yellow
rises out of woodwork
rises into hearts


—excerpt from ROYGBIV poem & work in progress for ‘anything but drab’ coming to Fruitlands Museum May 2025

color

Date : January 17, 2025
color 
on pages
in pigments
in dyes
in jars
on yards of thread
 
been reading Shaker
manuscripts account books
and journals of work performed
 
been looking at collected
colors in jars
 
been working on a new book
project needing a rainbow of
threads
 

drab drab drab

Date : November 25, 2024
drab drab drab 

reddish drab
sandy drab
silver drab
sage drab
salmon drab
dove drab
beaver drab
glove drab


reading old dye books
the name tells all

"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

found color

Date : November 19, 2024

working on prototype for
an upcoming project
 
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]

color is

Date : October 29, 2024
“Color is space.” 
Ethel Adnan


“Color is an essential part of construction.”
Elizabeth Burns-Meyer


.madder .cochineal.goldenrod.indigo.logwood

[‘The Beauty of Light: Interviews with Ethel Adnan,’ Etel Adnan & Laure Adler translated by Ethan Mitchell, Nightboat Books]

[Burns-Meyer from ‘The Book of Colour Concepts,’ Alexandra Loske and Sarah Lowengard, Taschen Books]

residency report

Category : Art, Books, Residency
Date : October 15, 2024
SkyDay Residency Report
Bascom Lodge 13 October

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]

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