Ink Maker

It is the first grey day of fall and I'm thinking about color. Pinks and reds are kissing the tips of the maple out front. The sun has shifted to a low enough orbit that it sneaks in under the clouds at an angle, burnished gold, as it sets.

In photography if you want deeper, richer colors in your picture you underexpose the image just a little. A little less light to make the colors deeper. That is what today is. Underexposed.

My fingernails at the keyboard are stained brown with the color of fall. Black walnuts from the next street over.

I've been making ink.

When I started getting interested in fountain pens two years ago I swore I'd draw the line at making my own ink. I've got too many things to do. I don't need another rabbit hole. Yet here I sit, sepia fingered, eyeballing the buckthorn fumbling purple berries onto my drive.

Making ink feels like collecting the spirit of a place. I can sample the color of a space in time and store it in a bottle. Like a sorcerer drawing forth the essence of a place for spellwork.

The buckthorn yields two cups of berries with a few minutes of effort. Boiled down in a pot they make a thick purple syrup heavy with sediment. Mixed with water steeped in wood ash, for there is color hiding there as well, the purple blossoms to blue then green then yellow. Alchemy.

I delight in the process. So much of my creativity gets diverted to my work. To income. This ink is profitless. It is a living color. In time it will change and fade. It's lack of stability means it will never be a product I can sell.

It feels rebellious, this ink. I don't even have the right kind of pen to use it with yet I sit here thinking of the art I will make. Grey taken from the acorn caps collected on the way home from dropping off my youngest at kindergarten, made into a wash of ink on watercolor paper, and hung on a wall where in time it will slowly fade. Bittersweet. A memory of a time in my life that too will fade, slipping through my fingers as I watch it depart.

Maybe that is what I am really doing here. Trying to hold on just a little longer to the autumn in which I watched my daughter first walk through the doors of her elementary school, then disappear around the corner. Bottling a time beautiful and painful in it's impermanence.

Fall Cyanotypes and British Racing Green

New Work for September

August ends with school supplies and leather orders.

The first leather order of what will eventually be the work I have ready for the holidays has arrived. I've spent the last few weeks looking over what sold well last year and taking inventory on what I might be running low on.

Today I starting cutting down the leather. In this batch I'll be getting a full set of wallets (Belhoste, Ensign, and Pointsmen) in British Racing green. I'm dedicating the other half to making a new collection of cyanotypes on leather.

The cyano-leather is the part I'm most looking forward to. I have some new ideas I would like to try out.

In the past I've relied on straight forward botanical silhouettes. In the print work I've been doing this year I've been exploring the idea of depth and layers. I've been trying to make a foreground, middle, and background and it's resulted in what I've been thinking of as the canopy effect. Leaf shadows passing through each other.

I'm hoping to figure out how to translate this onto leather. I'm imagining layers of ghostly maple leaves overlapping each other.

Cyanotypes on leather are finicky though. It can be hard to keep subtle detail from washing out. If that happens I'll just end up with splotchy leather.

All the Years That Brought Me Here

"See the tag? Hanging down. Yes. Park by that." The parking attendant points at the far wall.

"Um. That sign on the wall? There?"

"No. The tag. See that tag hanging there?" I glance over in the direction he's pointing, desperation creasing the ridge of my brow…. There's nothing. "Yes, that tag. Park by that."

"Oh okay. Thanks." I park in the general direction he was pointing and hope for the best.

I'm in a parking garage in downtown Cleveland, and I'm on a quest. Since the arrival of the pandemic I've been shooting black and white film. Being confronted by the fact that in such a short period of time my whole world changed and slipped away made me want to record it. Save some memory of what was lost.

Up until now I've been shipping out my film to be processed and returned. It's not cheap and it's getting to the point where I'm shooting less because I don't want to have to keep paying for it.

For a while now I've known about the Cleveland Print Room. They have open darkroom hours. I have a degree in photography and don't want to keep paying someone to process my film. I also have kids, a creative career, house repairs, laundry, meals to make. I've been planning on checking out the darkroom for four year's worth of "next weeks".

Today is the day.

Up the elevator, through a room of college students having a critique (Pardon me young people, elder millennial coming through.), and into the darkroom.

Well, not quite. Darkrooms generally have two parts. One part where you develop film and one part where you make the prints. I'm standing in the well lit film developing area. I get a tour. There is a large sink and lots of tanks and graduated cylinders.

The darkroom attendant gives me a quick run down of where the chemistry is, what temperature to use it at, and at what dilution. I'm staring at her and nodding confidently as the numbers she tosses at me bounce off my head like bugs on a windshield.

"Do you remember how to load film on a reel?" she asks. "It's like riding a bike."

I take some proffered test film and a reel, without looking at what I'm doing (with real film this has to be done in complete darkness.) I feel for the entry notches on the reel, slide the film into them, start ratcheting the reel back and forth, and the film is taken up with no snags.

I realize later this was probably a test on her part.

Having passed the test I get led back into the darkroom itself. A quick survey of the equipment. Things are pointed out to me, its dark, that I'm can only imagine, as its dark. Then I'm left to my own devices.

Loading film onto a reel is a compromising situation. You have to go into a little room and turn off all the lights. Once your film is out of the little canister you can't turn on the lights again until the film is on the reel and secured away in a developing tank. This is fine if everything goes as planned. Less so if you put the lid of the tank somewhere you can't find while groping around in the dark.

There is also a level of performance anxiety. You are in this little room. Everyone outside of that little room knows what you are doing in there. If you're in there too long everyone knows that something is going wrong in there. It's somewhere between using a bathroom stall at a busy airport and trying on clothes in a fitting room with an overzealous sales person.

Knock knock. "How's it going in there?"

The first reel loads like a charm. The second snags, is unwound, snags again, is cut to round off the corners (in the dark, by feel), and then smoothly transitions onto the reel.

I emerge from the little room with all the confidence and awkwardness of a twelve year old boy who just picked out his first pair of jeans at the Gap. Not too snug in the crotch. Equal parts swagger and cringe.

From there my experience begins to reassert itself. Temperatures are checked. Chemistry poured in.

When developing film you have to agitate the tank its in every thirty seconds or so. To keep fresh chemistry moving along the film. You can't shake the tank too much or you risk making bubbles that will settle on the film and ruin it. So there is a rolling of the wrist that turns the tank around. Then I tap it against the side of the sink to dislodge any wayward air pockets. I set the tank down and wait twenty five seconds to repeat it. For eight minutes I give this my undivided attention.

I love it. The very act is meditative. The tap tap. The rolling of the tank. The smell of stop bath is bilious and sharp. It's unpleasant to anyone who's never lost an afternoon to the dim red lights of a darkroom. To me it smells like being sixteen and doing something that feels almost occult in my high school darkroom. It smells of being twenty one, at college, and having the whole world before me. It smells of being thirty, making do in a makeshift darkroom, knowing that this wasn't going to be the life I thought it was, but doing it anyway, as a place to shelter in while life raged on outside in the light.

And now. It's smells of being forty two, finding my way back to it, developing pictures of my children that sixteen year old me never thought I'd have.

About twenty minutes later the rolling and tapping has ceased. I remove my now developed film from the wash, hold it up to the light, and laid out before me is my whole story.

My children, my neighborhood, campaign signs, the cello concert my neighbors put on in their yard, the small memories that slip so quietly through our lives, seen through the eyes of all the years that brought me here. Sixteen. Twenty one. Thirty. Forty two. Forever burned in grains of silver by the light that made them.

It's magic. It really is.

Once my film is dry I safely pack it up. I thank the darkroom attendant for her time and tell her I'll be back again soon.

My car is where I left it. No tickets. I still can't find the hanging tag, but it's fine.

I get home and show my kids these pictures I made of them year's ago. I can't tell if they are humoring me. Soon their interest is lost in stories about their day. Then dinner and a bath.

That night I go to sleep with the smell of stop bath just barely a whisper in the air around me as I fall asleep.

It snowed last night. I woke up to a wet pack of snow two inches deep. When it came down it brought most of the fall leaves with it.

It was a little sad. Bittersweet. I sat there looking out the window thinking about how soon I won't be able to hear the wind in the leaves anymore. Just the dry whistle of winter wind in the bare branches.

With the leaves buried under snow and the grey skies of Cleveland winter it will be time soon to put away to cyanotype materials. Any ambitions will have to rest until spring brings reliable sunshine back.

This could be a source of frustration, but I enjoy it. The second half of fall is like watching a friend pack their moving boxes. Every moment is savored, recorded, stored away.

For an anxious person like myself it's a chance to enjoy what is around me. I spend so much time living in the future in my head getting to stop and take a moment to smell the wet leaves is a respite to my running thoughts.

I think this is part of the reason why I make the work that I do. Good art is about saying the things we don't have words for yet. My cyanotypes are recordings of that fleeting moment when chance, and weather, and time, and personality come together and make something beautiful that will soon pass. Quiet magic gleaned from the edges of suburban lawns.