Over the past week I’ve been carefully cleaning the indigo pigment I harvested from my woad plants this year. This was possible because the morning after I was so disheartened to be left only with green form I opened my vat to discover a rich blue foam has developed overnight. I still don’t know why … Read more
Over this part summer my wife and I left a couple of plots “unplanted” in our garden. Instead we shook out last years woad seeds over the earth and let the plots be. As I had hoped, the woad plants grew up among the weeds. But last night it went down to 6 °C (43 … Read more
When my children and I collected the sap from the pine trees, we also ended up with extra bits of bark, bugs and leaves. I didn’t think that this would help in my little project, so I set about purifying the sap. The simplest way I could find to purify the sap was simply to … Read more
Today the children and I began by pruning the grape vines and ended up making charcoal. With the spring here it was time to prune back the old growth on my vines so that younger, grape bearing vines could replace them. As I was carefully choosing and pruning, my son came up asked asked what … Read more
Since I began this project I have been pining for a good blue to use in my work. Growing some woad and thereby having indigo to use was a wonderful start.Certain concerns, however, were always in the back of my mind as to whether such pigment could really be counted light-fast. So I kept … Read more
The final colour of my pallet that was still eluding me had been green. My only consolation in this frustration is that it has been is shared by every artist going back hundreds of years. There just aren’t many naturally green pigment sources out there. Historically, an artist’s choice boiled down to either malachite … Read more
With the city of Cambridge being the centre of the 100 mile ART Project, it was important to me that I find some pigment within its city limits. It was suggested that I contact Dufferin Aggregates, a local quarry, and see if I could search around their operation. In talking with Mark Graves, the pit … Read more
Before we headed back after visiting Kettle Point, Reiner suggested that we stop by the Hungry Hollow in Arkona. This is a famous location for collecting fossils that is made up of the same geological formation as Kettle Point but at a lower level geologically. Besides, it sounded like fun, so we headed over. After parking … Read more
This is one of the very unique places I have been looking forward to visiting for this project. Kettle Point takes it’s name from the round boulders, or “kettles”, that emerge from the underlying Devonian shale beds of Lake Huron. These natural wonders are actually concrentrations of calcite crystals which grew over many centuries around … Read more
This article is a series of journal entries from the 100 mile ART project, a project completed while artist-in-residence for the City of Cambridge in 2008. The goal of the project was to create a painting using only materials found or farmed within a 100-mile radius of Cambridge, Ont. Galena The last sample provided by Reiner … Read more