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.

Some of my most recent work featuring some of my oldest work. Cyanotypes and toned cyanotypes.

In a box, in the rarely used closet, in the extra bedroom that has become the kid's den, there is a binder filled with negatives.

A few weeks ago I dug the binder out and started scanning its contents. All the photographs I'd taken going all the way back to the summer of 2001.

It is interesting the things which are significant to me in them now. The cars on the streets. The way people dressed. All this work I did, but never did anything with. I can remember how I felt taking them. It is a visceral feeling, looking off onto my old horizons. Forgotten and found in a box in the back of a closet.

I'm slowly scanning my way through the binder. Uploading them into the digital era. I don't know what I'm going to do with them yet. I love the idea of making something with these old negatives. It feels like picking up lost threads. Coming full circle to finish that which I wasn't able to finish back then.

As I sit here, scanner purring away, I'm thinking about how value changes over time. Maybe it is because I'm in my midlife crisis era, or because I've got a little distance from the gaping maw of Instagram, but I'm thinking about how temporary many of the artifacts we would leave behind are.

Having been promoting myself on Instagram for almost a decade a remarkable amount of my history is there. All it would take is a shift in ownership, or terms of service, and that would all be gone.

I've got backups, sure, but no one is going to find my old photo editing apps in the back of a closet.

Nostalgia can be dangerous, wishing for a return to a place that never was, but it can also be the roots that keep us from washing away in the stream of time.

As I load another strip of negatives into the carrier for scanning I'm thinking about the Spotify playlists that won't be thumbed through in the back of dusty record shops by future generations. The clothes we wear for a season and then discard not lining the rack of vintage shops. Our collective digital memories sitting in an abandoned server farms. All of these things we'd leave behind washed away in the current.