reds of cochineal and crimson yellows of bark gold brown yellow green greens invisible olive pea and myrtle blues Prussian deep royal slate drabs red sandy silver sage salmon and dove purples crimson deep marron logwood lavender browns fast damson fawn olive and claret greys bark liver dark smoke batwings and doves
sending new year’s rainbows joy and radiance for 2025 and thanks for your presence here
[studio doodle | work in progress for 2025 project dye book from Harvard Shaker community]
"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
looking for brightneess in rainbows and revision structures on hand knit shawls dyed with goldenrod, gathered at wasteplaces stitched into circles emanating sunlight
banner: a long strip of cloth bearing a slogan or design, hung in a public place or carried in a demonstration or procession
these didn’t start as banners yet, as a way to mark color on cloth indigo, madder & coreopsis
later, hung on a Shaker cupboard finally sewn into a series of twelve, a perfect circle/perfectly round. shaker studies 01-12 . . pardon the pun, but coming full circle, dyeing these cloths lead me down a path exploring the Shaker’s use of color
four years later, study 06 hangs as a banner in Williamstown, MA and on Saturday, I will present my paper ’Prismatic Utopia,’ a threefold exploration of Shaker color—practical, temporal & spiritual at the Deerfield Fall Forum
Eyes on Art Town, 37 artists’ banners found in downtown Williamstown A Rich & Varied Palette: Coloring New England’s Past at Historic Deerfield, 13/14 September
[a perfect circle/perfectly round. shaker studies.06, 2021 Indigo on muslin, coreopsis and indigo on found textile, dyed cotton thread]
The title is from a quote by two Shaker Brethren, Calvin Green & Seth Y. Wells (1823)—“A circle may be called a perfect circle when it is perfectly round.”
”Thus, after enduring the storms and dangers of the sea, in an old, leaky ship, which had been condemned as unfit for the voyage, and came very near foundering at sea, they all arrived safe in New York, on the sixth of August following. This account was attested by the captain, and by many witnesses, both believers and unbelievers.”
This year marks the 250th anniversary of Arrival Day, when Shaker founder Mother Ann Lee and eight followers arrived in the harbor of New York. Eventually, they would settle in Niskayuna (Albany, NY).
Mother Ann Lee described as ‘clothed with the sun.”
“Appendix: A Brief History of the Rise and Progress of The United Society,” written by Calvin Green and Benjamin S. Youngs, in the 1855 ‘The Testimony of Christ’s Second Appearing.’
“Painting is a form of poetry
Colors are words
Their reflections rhythms.
The completed painting,
a completed poem.”
Sonia Delaunay
[from Kunst Please podcast
9.20.2021]
Substitute ‘painting’ for?
stitching
natural dyeing
………..
Images from ‘Sonia Delaunay’ catalogue from Tate exhibition 2015
Postcard from ‘Sonia Delaunay: Living Art’ Bard Graduate Center 2024