Paper is ink’s sister. Unsurprisingly, the ancient civilizations of China and Egypt seemed to have invented paper around the same time that they invented ink. Today, Eastern papers are often sold in rolls and act more like textiles, soaking up ink and allowing it to spread and bleed in curious ways, whereas Western watercolor paper is “sized,” which means its surface is treated with additives that fill pores and stiffen the paper, enabling the ink to sit on top of the paper and spread evenly across it. I love both but find the latter tends to reflect the whiteness of the paper, and in doing so, accentuates the mixing of colors in natural inks, as they react to each other on the page. For a more watery ink, however, there is something incredible about the way it can soak into and bleed across a fine Japanese handmade paper. The world of Japanese papers includes sizing as well as myriad textures, materials, and thicknesses that reward the explorer. The true tinkerer might also be drawn to making their own handmade paper as a medium for handmade ink.
For my ink tests I buy relatively inexpensive Stonehenge paper in large sheets and cut it down into squares. For a thicker, more archival-feeling paper I like Fabriano Artistico’s 300 lb hot press variety. I like to start with a whole pile of paper as well as little scraps for dipping into the color bath.
When you are working with natural inks and you make something you love, you may want to spray it with a fixative. I recommend the all-natural, milk-based casein fixative called Spectrafix. If you don’t want your work to fade or change with exposure, this fixative will archive it for you. It’s also worthwhile to take pictures of your tests as they are changing to have a record of the way they looked at any given moment. Personally, I try not to worry about the image I am creating and just sit back and let the ink do its thing on paper. This is the best drug: Playing with ink is somehow exciting and calming at the same time. I like to start with my most watery ink and create a large pool into which I drop the more intense colors. I am sure you will find your own method and rhythms and aesthetics. This is an art, craft, and science that has endless possibilities and no wrong moves.
Without a hand to guide it, ink is just colorful water. When I first started making my own ink with black walnuts, I bought a box of glass bottles, designed labels, and sent off a series of packages of carefully handmade, rich brown ink to all my favorite artists. A few of them sent me back artwork in the mail; a few sent me a note about how this art supply was working for them; a few posted their “tests” to Instagram. In fact, I find I am increasingly using Instagram as a collaboration tool. I call the people who use Toronto Ink “beta testers,” as each bottle is a work in progress, and each person who uses this ink takes it further than it could ever go alone. Take, for example, beta tester Marta Alexandra Abbott, an artist based in Rome. While in residency in 2017 on Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island, Marta collected seaweed that she then dipped in natural Toronto Ink Company pigments to create plant impressions—a triple collaboration between nature, artist, and inkmaker.
Kids are great beta testers, too, often ignoring the rules of art and craft and instead obeying the un-rules of pure experimentation and creativity. For this reason, some of my most important research happens at the level of work-shops and pop-up ink factories, which allow participants to make their own ink while connecting to their immediate environs. These gatherings help me to define the direction of my company. In making this book, I sent out a bunch of packages to my ink heroes—people who have been pushing the potential of ink since before I started making it. This list of ink heroes necessarily includes novelists, poets, and illustrators alongside pure visual artists. Along the way, my packages of ink have even had their own adventures. Some of my test bottles of ink were stopped at customs, some languished on the desks of gallery assistants, and at least one bottle of wild grape ink almost exploded on its way to meet Stephen King. What follows is the work of just a small sampling of some of my favorite visual thinkers.
KAYO NOMURA
Toronto Inks mixed with watercolors
HEIDI GUSTAFSON
Railway-Spike Rust
MARCEL DZAMA
Black Walnut,
Lye-Rich Sap Green
TUCKER NICHOLS
Lamp Black, Black Walnut,
Copper Oxide Blue
Above and next
EDEL RODRIGUEZ
Sumac, Lamp Black,
Black Walnut
GARY TAXALI
Prussian Blue, Copper Oxide Blue
(both custom-made)
ANI CASTILLLO
Wild Grape
MARTA ABBOTT
Sumac (left)
Canadian Goldenrod (right)
HIROAKI OOKA
Wild Grape, Buckthorn,
Rust (all custom-made)
LEANNE SHAPTON
Sap Green, Wild Grape, Turmeric
JASON POLAN
Three-Borough Acorn Cap Gray
TAMARA SHOPSIN
Sap Green
HUGO GUINNESS
Gray Horsetail Ash
SETH
Oak Gall Prussian Blue (custom-made)
DAVE EGGERS
Sumac, Lamp Black
MARGARET ATWOOD
Wild Grape,
Lamp Black
MICHAEL ONDAATJE: When I was nine years old in a Sri Lankan boarding school, I decided to make ink, thinking I could make some money out of it. I bought, from some ancient shop, these ink tablets and filled a bathtub full of water and put the tablets in. I had more ink than I would ever need in my whole life. In any case, no one was interested in buying any of it, so it’s strange that half a century or more later, I meet someone who actually makes ink. I’m just wondering if you had a kind of seminal moment in your youth where the future of ink turned up?
JASON LOGAN: When I was eighteen, I spent a couple months in a hospital where I couldn’t eat anything, I couldn’t do anything, I was just immobilized in bed with an IV, and someone gave me a sketch pad and I just started drawing and writing. I think ink for me has always been a connection between drawing and writing. When you write with ink it’s very tight. It makes really fine, crisp lines, and then when you add water it becomes this sort of watery, wavery thing that’s like drawing, and I love that you could do both. For me the physicality of ink started in my sketchbooks at maybe eighteen or nineteen.
MO: And that’s also a thing that we can talk about now or even later on—the relationship between the word and drawing—or language and the sketch, and how they influence each other.
JL: I feel like every letter of every word is a little sketch of some kind. I think that words come at us first as an image and then we sort of decide what that image means. People talk about pictures and words as if they are separate things. I also spent so long in design and typography and I’m so aware of where letters curve and interact with each other.
MO: Were there books you remember that sort of blended these two things? Blended the act of language and the act of drawing? There was Kenneth Patchen’s book of poetry called The Journal of Albion Moonlight that had lots of drawings in it. Or, more recently, something like John Berger’s book Bento’s Sketchbook, which is presented as a sketchbook, but it has his writing describing incidents and anecdotes, as well as his drawings. For someone like him, these two art forms are very, very close—these two languages really.
JL: I love the moment when writers go “I just have to sketch this right here,” like in The Little Prince, when he draws the elephant inside the snake. There is no better way to do that then to draw your little picture right now.
MO: The poet Alice Oswald told me that she will do an abstract sketch on a page or two to try and discover the possible structure or plan of what she is going to write.
And just the other day I saw some of the letters of David Milne and other artists. Which are stunning, for a paragraph will be followed by a sketch of something he saw that morning, and then the sentences will continue. It felt to me like a perfect art form. It’s the language of the drawing as well as the handwriting.
JL: It somehow adds to the personal urgency or something: “I am going to try to explain this to you in words—oh no, I need more than that—I can draw you a picture.”
MO: It’s not formal. It’s a quick fragment, an aside.
JL: I love your word fragment. That piece of something left behind that is not the artwork or the finished form but something preparatory. Something that will fall away in the making. You have let me in on notebook first drafts of your novels, and the handwriting is beautifully illegible with various crossing-outs and colored boxes that only mean something to you, and yet I get a kind of meaning from them, a kind of energy. I find these scraps electrifying. I guess my question is, Why is the sketch so satisfying? And is the sketch just another part of the foraging process or a special thing of its own for you? Does it gain new meaning as a book becomes a complete thing for you?
MO: I am not sure if those are fragments or some subterranean plan that as an author I have not fully understood while using it. Like those abstract sketches by Alice Oswald. As in there is some buried map I am walking around in, not realizing it is Troy, or somewhere significant. I usually do not discover the real intent of the book until about three-quarters of the way into it. “Ah, so this is where I am going.” So those early drafts are not so much sketches, but scraps. They may be questions to myself, or a clue. Sometimes I will glue a short poem by someone into the page of my exercise book where I am writing that has no connection to the work on the page. In a way, it is very much like your process of adding an element to the process of making an ink—a tone, a hint of X or Y that adds to the composition and color of an ink. But the look of those notebooks that have the first drafts—when I look back at them some years later when the book is over—still is a sort of mystery. It does not explain how the book was made or gathered. For me, in fact, the pleasure is in the curiosity of looking at them, the look of them. The process of the journey is still inarticulate. As you say, it reveals the energy. But it is almost as if it was not made by me.
JL: It’s exciting. . . . Van Gogh’s letters to his brother have beautiful little sketches.
MO: It would be nice to have such images like that in your book. It seems that there is some kind of twofold process here: I am mostly a writer and I would love to be able to draw, I’d love to be able to play the piano—those are crafts I don’t feel like I can step into yet. Still, the kind of gathering of an idea, an emotion, or a feeling, or a sound when I am writing draws on them in some way. When I met you, I was meeting someone who was gathering and collecting and putting things together in much the same way, but to make an ink. It was completely fascinating to me. I hadn’t even known ink could be made in such a way, except from those damn ink tablets I bought in Colombo. I hadn’t known it had to do with collecting the ingredients. . . . So how does it begin?
JL: I think that things come out better when you forage first. I am loving all the fall foraging possibilities right now. If I have a full morning of looking for wild grapes, say, and then a couple hours of mashing and distilling them, and boiling them up, and sterilizing the glass bottles and then sterilizing the little glass funnel and pouring it into the bottle and cutting my paper to exact sizes and adding a little stamp that says Toronto Ink Company, it is then—and only then—that I can begin. As a result, whatever I do, the mark is important because I know every piece that went into that mark.
MO: I wonder how different this is to writing. If I am writing something I don’t really have that knowledge, or that intent, or even that understanding that something will be there when I finish it. So, maybe that process that you describe, the squashing of the grapes, the printing—all that stuff—for me actually happens when I’m actually writing, to discover whatever it is I’m writing about. Some writers know exactly what they are going to say beforehand, while I realize what the book is about as I approach the end. So the foraging for me happens in the very act of writing words down.
JL: I think there are two different pieces there, though. There are for me, anyway. There’s the foraging, which is like, “Look, I need to do some research here. There are things I need in order to do this job.” Then there’s another kind of foraging as well, that’s like, “I’m going to go out this morning, and I’m just going to . . .”
MO: Discover something.
JL: Yes, discover something and let things speak to me. I read that Guy Davenport book of essays that you recommended to me [The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays]. There is one essay at the very end on foraging. He used to go out with his family foraging for—
MO: Arrowheads.
JL: Yes, arrowheads. There’s a great line in there where he says—near the end—“I learned from a whole childhood of looking in fields how the purpose of things ought perhaps to remain invisible, no more than half known. People who know exactly what they are doing seem to me to miss the vital part of any doing.”
MO: Exactly!
JL: There is something so delicious about not knowing what you are doing. I love the, “I’m just going out.” There is always something weird that happens.
MO: Very definitely. And that is one of the things that I admire about what you do. I mean I have seen you putting a mordant and various elements together. What is exciting about witnessing what you do is that kind of actual physical foraging—going out, finding “grape,” this color of the grape or the color of some other herb. Can you talk a bit more about that? If not the pleasure, but the skill. Where do you forage, for instance?
JL: Well, the most promising stuff in the last few years has been these in-between places. Places where concrete and metal and building materials and old sidewalks meet grasses and weeds and vines. I just kind of like those areas. There is just sort of a part of me, a childlike glee, that’s attracted to walking along a railroad track. But also, traditionally the best colors for dyes and for natural pigments have come from weeds, and weeds tend to grow in these out-of-the-way places in cities.
MO: Can I ask you why that is? Do you have any idea why the colors of weeds are more interesting?
JL: I feel like weeds are just tougher, I feel like they’ve got—they have had to solve more problems. There are a lot of weeds that are used for medicine, too. I met this doctor, who I love, who is sort of curing cancer with dandelion roots.
MO: Really?
JL: He really is. He was a chemist, and he has become an herbalist essentially, and he said that after thirty or forty years of chemistry, he realized that nature is the best chemist. It’s been doing it over the last half a million years. These tough weeds have just figured out the answers to things, and one of the things they have figured out is how to intensify color. I am not even totally sure why weeds are often the best source of color, but they really are.
MO: Anyway, you were talking about the various places you go and find these things.
JL: The one thing is that I find the weeds in the sort of corner pockets of the city. Also in these pockets of the city are metals and industrial waste. When I started out with this inkmaking, I really wanted to do it all naturally. I wanted an art supply that I could cook up in my kitchen that I could use around the kids; as I started getting into it I found there were a lot of cool things you could do with metals that are not totally nontoxic or natural.
MO: Can you talk a bit about that?
JL: The most famous case is the oak gall ink, which is an ink made from these little oak apples or oak galls that form on oak trees where a wasp has laid her eggs; the interaction between the baby wasps and the tree creates this really intense tannic acid, which when mixed with iron makes a long-lasting ink—one that has been used for centuries, from around the birth of Christ to the present. A couple thousand years of the blackest, most archival ink. A classic case of metal interacting with nature. The result is this super velvety, beautiful black. But I’ve also started picking up pieces of copper wire and putting them in vinegar and watching them. The way that pennies get green, the copper wire becomes blueish green.
MO: Weren’t you supposed to urinate on copper to make it green?
JL: You can urinate, too. Specifically for copper metal, the best is apple cider vinegar and a bit of salt; you get a beautiful greenish blue. It’s the blueish green that’s on the papyrus of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Egyptians were using this same pigment—they mixed it with glass, actually. And when you see it, it has a kind of—it feels a bit Egyptian. It’s a blue-green, with a slightly psychedelic, Egyptian gods feel to it. Very nice with black.
MO: So, there is this huge source in the world around us to make ink. It’s not just one source—it seems to be everywhere in terms of what’s available.
JL: I’d say yes and no. Sometimes I start telling people about ink and then they set out and every time they see something they smash it up and add water to it, and come back to me irritated it didn’t make ink. I want to be careful with my proselytizing. I do feel like you can make color from anything, but there’s a lot of things that look really colorful that produce zero color. I guess the quick answer is that there’s an amazing amount of stuff in the world that can make ink and almost no one is making ink out of natural materials.
MO: If you are going to talk about ink in Japan, for instance, as opposed to ink in Europe or Germany, is it very different? Is it the same recipe or is it a whole different language?
JL: Well, modern Japan certainly makes a lot of beautiful pens, but there’s a big split in Eastern and Western ink worlds. The main innovation that came from China and moved to Japan was just that ink is in a solid form.
MO: In China, originally?
JL: And still, in China. If you’re a kid learning calligraphy you take your stone and some kind of ink stick and you rub the ink stick against the stone and you add a little bit of water. It’s an amazing innovation because a big part of people’s stories about ink are how they spilled ink on something and stained it forever. The innovation of the classic Chinese ink is to ask: Why not have it as a block so that you can drip as much water on it as you want? You become the maker of the ink.
MO: But that is for the paint brush?
JL: Yes, the brush. It’s such a different relationship to everything because their letterforms are pictures, and everything is brushed and you’re learning to be a painter as you are learning to communicate. Like you and I are interested in the relationship between words and painting and communication and art and all that, but for someone of any age and any interest in China or Japan, you would just be inherently learning art and writing at the same time. It’s one. And the paper is—our paper is all about the ink sitting on top of it, it’s crisp and clean, whereas the Japanese papers are soft and the ink actually slowly enters it, and the two join each other.
MO: So, as the main figure in the Toronto Ink Company, do you have contacts with places like Japan in terms of other artists and inkmakers? Has that happened, or does that interest you?
JL: Yes, there’s almost no small-scale, naturally sourced inkmaking companies in the world. But there are lots of people in pockets all over the world who are experimenting with ink in different ways or with natural colors or with historical pigments. I think I told you, I’m so excited about this guy, Ooka of the Shadows. I’m saying “guy” but I’m not sure if they’re male or female, but Ooka of the Shadows lives in a tiny village somewhere in Japan, and I send my ink to Ooka of the Shadows, and Ooka of the Shadows sends me back these ink-moving tools—different things he or she has built with bamboo and metal and things that he or she has carved, new ways of moving ink around. I feel like we are both inventing new forms for ink together. It’s really exciting. Ooka of the Shadows just did a show of work. I made him or her a bunch of ink that crystallizes, that forms little crystals, and Ooka of the Shadows made an art show using those inks for the victims of the [2011 Tōhoku] tsunami, one of these little fishing villages that was almost totally wiped out by the tsunami. So, there’s that person. Then there is this woman in Berlin I have this relationship with around distillation. She sends me—
MO: What do you mean by distillation?
JL: Well, a big part of inkmaking is that you take some color and you sort of distill it down. You intensify that color in some way and one of the ways to intensify color is that you let the water evaporate off and you get the color left over. She does these ink tests where it’s just what’s left over underneath the teacup—she’ll have a date with a friend and she’ll send me just the saucer from that date. So, I am working on what I can do with that.
MO: So, what most people don’t realize is that there is a lot of mail going back and forth between these countries that’s not the usual letter.
JL: That one was the flying saucer! It’s so exciting to get stuff in the mail. There’s another woman, named Heidi, who lives in the Pacific Northwest, who sends me these vials. She is only interested in iron. I send her iron water and iron-based ink and she sends me back these little vials of different colors of iron ore that are sort of pulverized down. I love the mail.
MO: There was something you said when we met recently. It was something about how important iron is in your craft. At first it seems like two totally different continents. One the liquid form, the other this basic hard metal. Can you talk a bit about that?
JL: I’ve been doing so much reading about iron. It’s—I don’t know where to start. On the human level, it was our first, as far as we know, ritualistic communication material. The very oldest examples of iron as a communication material can be found in caves in South Africa, and in those caves is this pulverized reddish rock, which has iron in it. Either it was used as face paint, or it was blown on the walls, or it was mixed with water to form some sort of paint. So, it’s just this first way of striking out into the world as humans.
And if you look at the fact that most of Australia is iron—that iron-red—it makes sense that it played such a huge role for the first people there. And also, our first really good hard metal was iron. You think of the Iron Age—one of the first metal ages. And the very first real hard iron-based metals were made by the gods.
MO: Alchemy.
JL: Lightning hits the ground and fuses rock, and that rock became this thing that gets beaten into swords. Iron is such a—the iron plow has got a billion super-important human uses, but then it’s a bit elemental that way. It’s also so special because it really wants to give up electrons, in terms of its pure atomic chemistry. Iron is an element—from the periodic table—it’s the element that wants to give away electrons and oxygen. Oxygen is the element that most wants to take on electrons, so the two of them have this amazing . . . marriage. It works for them, and it produces rust. I use rust for my ink because it’s living, thriving, multicolored, multihued—rust is amazing.
MO: So does it survive in color?
JL: It really survives. It survives and changes. That’s the other thing that makes my ink different than those evil corporate inks. It keeps changing. It’s like a good vintage wine—you get a different one every year and not only that, it’s going to change on the page, too.
MO: It will continue to change?
JL: Yes, it’s alive. It’s living, ink. I’ve got a few artists that use my inks. There’s a guy in Scotland and someone in Poland and all over the world I have artists that love the textures and these subtle colors, and I just let them know it’s totally not archival. You make a painting with this ink and I don’t know how long it will last, and it might look different in a year. But I sort of like that.
MO: I remember you gave me a copy of one of these wonderful pages with three or four colors. There was a gray one, and I think you made those inks out of some ship?
JL: Oh, the Franklin.
MO: The Franklin. What exactly—how close to the ship did you get—what exactly did you make that out of?
JL: Well, that was almost like constructing a poem or a story or something. It was such a delicious project. I had an artist friend who was invited onto the National Geographic ships that were going up to the Arctic to study what was left of the Franklin expedition [the doomed 1845 British voyage to explore the Arctic led by Sir John Franklin]. Two ships went down [129 men were lost and the wreckage of the two ships was not discovered until 2014 and 2016].
MO: The Terror and the Erebus . . .
JL: Yes, the Terror and the Erebus. The guys all lost their minds. Some of them ate each other. There was spiral-shaped writing in a journal.
MO: Oh dear.
JL: The Inuit people up there had their own mythologies around it. A lot of our knowledge is from their stories about these ships. There was a whole problem with lead poisoning. They put everything in cans and there was all this British arrogance. There are about a million delicious pieces to it. In Greenwich, England, they have this museum dedicated to all the artifacts that have slowly come forth, and this friend of mine, who had been invited up on the National Geographic boat to write about it and draw some pictures of the artifacts, asked me if I could make some inks for her to use.
MO: So she stole some things from the ship? Some metal and wood?
JL: I created this series of about five inks. Lichen and rust, and bone and wood, and lead and quinine. I tried to choose what I saw as the elements of their world. Like, if they had had to make an ink, what could they have possibly made that ink out of? And some of them were kind of poetic. I turned the lead-poisoning theme into an ink. I ground up lead pencils, which made this beautiful silvery ink. And lichen. I collected a bunch of lichen from the oldest rocks in Canada. That’s where urine comes back into the story, because the best color of lichen comes from prepubescent boys’ urine mixed with the far-north lichen that forms this kind of beautifully hued, really important color.
MO: Good God, who knew?
JL: I’m constantly entering into this weird, deep place—the internet is great for this type of thing. There’s a long, elaborate story about the color yellow. India yellow. The rumor, which seems utterly impossible to dispel or accept, is that this intense yellow color that was used for hundreds of years in European painting is made when you force cows to eat mango leaves and their pee becomes this intensified version of the mango leaf, and then that is collected, dried, and formed into these little balls that get shipped off to the finest ateliers in Europe and made into paint. It's one of the great stories about color.
MO: Are there great shops in Paris or Bulgaria that sell ink? In Paris, I know of these art supply shops which I’ve been to that are wonderful.
I emailed you the other day because [my wife] Linda [Spalding, writer and editor] was trying to make some colors for wool. But when I see you making ink there is always something that you have to add to it, not to solidify it, but to make it work, and you use the word mordant, but what exactly is a mordant?
JL: It’s the bite. I guess the bite is the thing. I’ve applied it to inkmaking, but it comes from dye and dyers’ recipes: the idea that in order to make the color bite into the cloth—if you imagine this bunch of fluffy wool that you want the color to not just pass over but rather to grip onto—it takes some sort of mordant. Salts. Salt is a big one.
MO: When you put together your various recipes, when you are making inks, are you often surprised? Is the element of surprise something you wait for? Or, does it happen a lot? Or is it something that by now you know what is going to happen? Are there failures that lead to something interesting—an accident or something?
JL: When I say I love fermenting things in the backyard, I have pots of things that go moldy and make no color—I feel like I’m constantly trying out new things that are not working at all. You must remember being a kid and mixing your paints. There’s a certain point where it just becomes totally muddy. There’s a point when it’s really exciting and then it’s, “Oh God.”
MO: It goes too far.
JL: I feel like I have that a lot. I started painting on 16-mm film and got really excited by that. I had this beautiful old film of flowers blooming in fast motion, and I decided I was really into the metals and adding them to rust and copper and had the metals growing with the flowers. I didn’t try it through a film projector, it was just beautiful to look at; each little frame was growing its own metal, and then the metal kept growing and just started eating through this celluloid and destroying it. I’ve had some really, really beautiful, important moments that have happened and then gone too far and can’t be recorded in any way. I remember this specific one, this beaker. I had my headphones on, deep into the music, I had the beaker going. It was my very first experiment with making ink that crystallized, and I had my room all covered in the celluloid of the film, it was surrounding me and it was snowing outside, and I felt utterly encompassed by my own world. It was a project I’d been asked to do for someone. And I felt like a wizard. “I’m a wizard—I’ve been asked to do this—I’m utterly on my own, I’m utterly out there in some world, but I’ve been commissioned, I’ve been entrusted to do this,” and there was something about the way it was snowing outside; I felt safe and warm yet weird at the same time.
MO: It was probably affecting you physically.
JL: I’m sure it was. I was shaking this tiny beaker—I’m really into medical glassware—and then the beaker broke, and I cut my hand, and I was there in my messy studio. It was sloppy. I remember so well the feeling of it all being right, and then the feeling of—what am I doing shaking this stupid beaker of yellow liquid. I feel like that’s a really important part of the whole process, is feeling ridiculous and then feeling excited that the thing that seemed ridiculous is actually sort of transcendent. And then it falls apart again.
MO: There’s an old tradition of that. With your knowledge of nature around you here in Toronto, in Ontario, I wonder, are there other parts of the world you would specifically love to go to? For foraging? In North America or India or what? I’m just curious, if intellectually you think of a certain area of the world where you would love to gather some elements?
JL: The Middle East is really, really important for tree gums and saps and stuff like that. Something important happened between the way that ink and painting and pigments came together in human history. It was a trade between India and China, and then India and China and the Middle East, and then the Middle East and Europe—similar to the spice trade. For instance, the very best oak galls are called Aleppo oak galls, and they only come from Aleppo. There’s Japan, which I’d love to go to. And I’d love to go to the salt mines of Poland. I feel like salt is a really, really special ingredient. It’s up there with iron for me. Magical.
MO: The whole map-like sense of the moving cultures is very interesting: Middle East, Asia, China, and I guess eventually the Western world.
JL: The shellac that I buy comes from these little shellac beetles that come from a bush in the high mountains in India. Almost everything I make, I make from the streets of Toronto, except the shellac. I would like to at least meet those little beetles.
MO: The first creature that I remember very vividly is called the golden beetle in Sri Lanka. It was sacred.
JL: Beetles strangely play a really important role in pigment and ink.
MO: What other creatures?
JL: There’s also those little beetles, or mites, that live on the prickly pear cactus. They eat the purple—the magenta syrup of the prickly pear cactus. Mexico almost more than any other place is rich in color. There are parts of England, too. The English have this kind of satisfying, witchy relationship to all the herbs, and the dyeing of the wool. And then there’s Italy.
MO: [Laughs]
JL: I mean I think there’s two fantasy journeys to go on. One of them is to go find some of the sources, and the other one is to just go to a place where they’ve been making things with a very particular method for the last eight hundred years in the same way, and to really see that. I would love to get a bit exacting. Now that I know a few things about color, it would be nice to meet a real color master. I feel like I know a lot of obscure things but I don’t feel like a craftsman at all. I’m more like a deep ink researcher. I would love to go to Florence and have the guy say, “Why are you grinding it in this clockwise motion?” I’d love to have my wrist slapped by some specifics of color manufacturing.
MO: We should plot about a journey. And find out where these professionals are, first of all. I remember being in India and going through whole villages where it was all about dyeing cloth. Fantastic fields of cloth to the horizon.
JL: There’s saffron. Saffron is another one. Pollen from the tiny little flower. And when you get enough of it, it’s this beautiful intense yellow.
MO: You have a sort of record of a lot of your work. You have your sketchbooks, which you’ve shown me over the last few years, pages and so forth. Can you talk about that? What is the process of that? It’s kind of like a journal in a way.
JL: I really like to go to a place, and on my way back I make a postcard of that experience. It’s almost like those things I make are little triggers to remind me of the place that I’ve gone to. They are not the place I’ve gone to, but they are more like the little marker on the way back. And, I’ve been heavily influenced by that quotation that you gave me—“following the brush.” Sometimes I put those things on paper, and I sell them, and I put them up on the wall and they are beautiful in and of themselves, but they are not—they are not really art. They are not.
MO: Well they are, they are. What’s nice is that you don’t have to feel professional for something to be art. Things are art.
JL: I guess so. But maybe it’s best to say that some of those things I do on the sheets of paper are a record.
MO: They are a record, but they are also an experience. They are evidence.
JL: Evidence is a great word.
MO: They are also stunningly beautiful. I think of your work as a map.
JL: Maybe map is a good word, too. The river is going to change, everything is going to change. The Earth is moving, the plates are moving—it’s all moving, but at some point, the country was called this, and the border was here, and there was a mountain there. For me, at some point when the gypsum dust that I ground down from the drywall that I found near my house, when that hit this new liquid copper that I made, they came together and then they separated out. And that’s something that happened once, that really did happen.
