On Thursday I had some time so I made inks, lake pigments (still in the process of finishing them) and a few rust experiments. All based on onion skins or the remains.
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Thinking of onions.
Layered and complex.
Raw, they might make you cry.
Cooked, they are sweet and subtle.
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One bottle above is an ink made with onion skin and water. It's the base for the other four, each including a different modifier to shift the color.
One of the lake pigments.
A bright spot.
I also layered in some of the onion skins with fabric to make rust prints.
The hearts you might find are deliberate, not the product of chance.
This month I am reading See No Stranger by Valarie Kaur.
A bit to consider from a podcast conversation between Kaur and Brene Brown:
“I realized that we’re co-creating culture every second with every breath we take, every word we say, every choice we make and that it’s possible to practice the world that we want in the spaces between us.” Valarie Kaur
One of the things that I am been thinking about is the need to practice making decisions; for both adults and children. That this is a muscle that we need to exercise in small ways so that when the big decisions come we won't freeze.
How do we practice?
Within the process of making and being creative are so many opportunities to make decisions.
The figure above was originally the back of a project. I decided that I liked it better and so it become the side that would show.
I was going to stitch the features of a face in but I've decided to leave it empty, without expression.
Two On Being conversations that I have revisited recently:
I know I have quoted this before but again...
And there’s so many forms for making.... I love reading the dictionary. And the Oxford English Dictionary has I don’t know many pages devoted to “to make,” and “making,” and all of its possibilities. And I think that’s like making — it’s the same as making a list of all the materials that exist in the world that you might transform in some way. It’s like, if you make that list and you take the list of every — all the possibilities of what “making” is, that can just keep you busy forever. Ann Hamilton