This is one of my favorite images of my grandmother taken many years ago. We had walked down below her house to feed the sheep apples after dinner one night while I was visiting. She is looking out across the fields, towards where the tree line starts again.
My grandmother was deeply rooted to the place where she lived and it was very evident in how she lived her life. That's what I see in this picture, her love of the place she called home.
While I was in California I collected soil for paint.
Some came from the ditch along the road to the house (it's too long to be called a driveway).
And another batch was collected from a bank along the road, under the roots of a redwood tree stump.
The scratch marks were made by scrapping the clump of clay on the paper, the top mark is the clay dissolved in the water until I could use it like a watercolor. I will be processing the clay further to make a smoother pigment but I wanted to get a sense of what it would be like.
I think my grandmother would have liked this.