Iron Gall Ink, part 1

Sometimes I wonder if I a medieval monk in a former life? I have such a fascination with "how things used to be done." Or maybe it's just the deep satisfaction of making things from scratch as opposed to picking up a shiny plastic bottle of modern chemistry at the art store. I simply prefer to work with materials made from my own hands, whose ingredients are known and natural and completely pronounce-able, and which can be executed with humble means. And so it is with the latest project in the studio: iron gall ink.

I was down in southern Oregon recently, spending a lot of time in the dry woods there. Scrub oak abounds and every now and then you see these golf ball and baseball-sized pale tan bulbs on them. Some sort of fruit? Nature's christmas ornaments? It turns out they're oak galls -- dry, hard, gourd-like growths on a very small percentage of oak trees.  These growths are the result of the tree trying to protect itself from a parasite, the gall fly, which is a generic term for any insect that causes a plant to produce galls (oak aren't the only trees to make these). Being the "medieval art techniques" geek that I am, I remembered that these galls were a key ingredient in the way ink used to be made so I brought home a big bag of them.

What makes these important for ink making is their high level of gallotannic acid, which (correct me if I'm wrong) is the thing that keeps the ink from fading. Probably also the reason why red wine stains so badly, due to the tannic acids (this coming from a Google-armchair-chemist so don't quote me!). Anyway, most of the galls are a pale tan color, but color variations include beautiful blushes of pink and peach, to dark brown and even nearly black --

When I first brought them home they were so pretty and pristine. I could have filled a big bowl with them, making a nice centerpiece. But I kept them in the bag for a day or two as I gathered info and ingredients.  When I went to open the bag I was surprised to find that the galls were full of holes! Not only that but when I opened the bag a couple of moths flew out. Apparently their larvae had been living inside the galls and had hatched and chewed their way out. At the bottom of the bag were some telltale larva casings --

Pretty voracious eaters, too. White most of the holes were very small (maybe 1/8" in diameter at most), some were quite large --

But the moths had their chance to escape.  I let the galls sit out a few more days to make sure the moths were gone.  Soon it was time to proceed with the ink making. The monks of old would have used a mortar and pestle, but if they'd had these oh-so-useful electric spice grinders I'm sure they would have sung praises to the heavens for the miracle of technology, probably drawing little Cuisinart cartoons in the margins of their manuscripts with happy little monk-dudes dancing nearby --

Big bowl of ground oak galls -

Since iron gall ink was pretty much the only ink used for centuries, recipes are numerous. But typical of really old recipes like that, every single one is different, often drastically so. I've decided to go with one of the fermented recipes as I read they make the darkest ink. Since I've got a considerable amount of ground gall I'm going to use a recipe that uses a high proportion of gall-to-water. Since I don't have a bucket of rainwater sitting around, I'm using distilled water. Four parts water to one part ground gall, by weight (below I'm using 60 oz. water to 15 oz. gall)

Now to set it in a sunny corner for a few days or a week to ripen it. I just hope the stink doesn't get out of control.

Art to the Nth degree

Check out this artist, Keith LoBue's, blog starting from the June 3, 2010 entry titled "Poetical Modesty, In Progress -- Stage 1". The link is here. I think he posted 5 stages in all, with extensive commentary and photos all detailing his latest work. What's fascinating is to witness his creative vision unfolding with each entry, not to mention his impressive master craftsmanship.

And if you take art to the Nth degree and raise it to the level of the esoteric, you get Claudio Corallo's art. That's right.. chocolate. But this is chocolate like you've never had before. This is the pure cacao plant reverence. Seriously. This is beyond chocolate.

You are not surprised at the force of the storm—

you have seen it growing.

The trees flee. Their flight

sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:

he whom they flee is the one

you move toward. All your senses

sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.

The trees' blood rose. Now you feel

it wants to sink back

into the source of everything. You thought

you could trust that power

when you plucked the fruit;

now it becomes a riddle again,

and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you knew

where each thing stood.

Now you must go out into your heart

as onto a vast plain. Now

the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind

sucks the world from your senses like withered

leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.

It is what you have.

Be earth now, and evensong.

Be the ground lying under that sky.

Be modest now, like a thing

ripened until it is real,

so that he who began it all

can feel you when he reaches for you.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

"Tree Whisperer", by Sherer and Ouporov (egg tempera, acrylic, gold leaf on poplar and birch, 2005)

When you want to give something presence, you have to consult nature.

- Louis Kahn, architect

Searching out the lines that already exist interests me more than imposing new ones.… Pressing leaves into the bark of a tree produces lines dictated by the tree's growth patterns. The intention is not just to make a line, but to draw the change, movement, growth and decay that flow through the place.

- Andrew Goldsworthy, artist

(Andrew Goldsworthy image)

My time at the Sandpoint studio is coming to an end. Rumor has it the new developers want the place vacated by May 1st. I will miss it there, with the waterfront and the old wood floors and high open-beamed ceiling. But it will be nice to have my work back home again. No more commuting, no more too-hot-in-summer and too-cold-in-winter, and I can wander down in the middle of the night to work if I want. That will be nice. Still a lot to do to finish off the basement, but it's coming along. I have my work cut out for me these next few months.

Been working hard at the studio, all to finish this piece for an upcoming auction. The title of the work is "The Measure of Her Fortitude." It's a mixed media piece incorporating found objects including a quail egg, sparrow's nest, Victorian brass hardware pieces, antique ruler, fossilized nautilus shell, animal bone, Bakelite and bone beads, beeswax, tarot card, watch face, hemp thread, vintage rusted tin container, old metal frame, powdered pigments, wood, wire, nails, paint and glue. It measures about 15" in height. There's quite a bit of depth and dimension to the piece which was hard to capture completely in the photos, so I've uploaded two very differently lit pictures to try to convey this. First, with top-down lighting --

And this one, lit from both sides which emphasizes the depth of the frame behind the central image --

I had so much fun doing this. It's actually a re-working of a piece I started in a deMeng workshop last fall and which I even uploaded a picture of here in this blog a few months ago.

My favorite element is the sparrow's nest material tucked into the lower part, inside a turned-up Victorian drawer pull. The color of the nest was much grayer than I wanted so I mixed in some gold colored hemp thread to warm it up. It worked out quite well (below hangs an amber Bakelite bead and an animal's femur bone) -

Up on top is the nautilus shell and the quail egg. I devised a way to reinforce the egg so that breakage is unlikely, even though it sits freely on the wire and can rotate around. I really love sculpture with moving parts -

And below is another "moving part" element -- the bone beads threaded onto brass nails on either side of the central image. The beads move back and forth giving the whole thing an abacus-like feel. Between the beads and the metal frame piece you can just make out the textured surface where I tried to match the rusted metal. I tried to keep as much of the rusted metal showing, but as I had to affix the metal frame pieces with some epoxy putty I needed to cover that up to match the rusted tin. Powdered pigments really helped with this --

And here's the back of the piece, showing the backside of the old rusty tin. I love that burnished and rusted gold surface and didn't want to hide it, although the other side of the piece is just rusted tin with no old gold paint on it. You can also see some of the ways I attached all the pieces together. I used rivets (hard to see, but they're there) to attach the wood rulers to the tin, and brass nails to secure the wood piece in the center (the tarot image is on top of the wood). Down at the bottom are a couple of Lowes-bought brass machine screws and nuts. They were shiny-brand-spanking-new, which I burnished on the front side of the piece to match the aged look, but on the back here I just left them new and shiny. I threaded some brass wire through holes drilled into the tin to create something to hang the piece on a wall -

I'm fascinated by illuminated manuscripts. So much to love about them, from the sacred texts that are made even more sacred through artistic embellishment, to the archaic secrets behind ink formulas and quills, to the gold leaf and the preparation of the animal skin vellums. And what got me started again with this interest? I’ve recently been reading C.G. Jung’s “Red Book”. It was made public for the first time last month. Jung, of course, touches on some other favorites--mythology and symbolism--which were richly portrayed in medieval times, the peak of production for illuminated manuscript. All of these converging interests of mine, going round and round, circling in toward that which draws me strongly, artistically. Here are some images from Jung's "Red Book"

So I'm prowling the internet again, searching for images of ancient texts, and tonight I hit the mother lode. It seems that palaeographists are so thankfully passionate about their discipline they’ve built enormous (and, best of all, free) online image libraries of historical texts and manuscripts. The sites take some patience to navigate and presume the viewer knows more than a little about the subject, so you have to do some poking around to get to the images. My favorite site is the Digital Scriptorium -- http://www.scriptorium.columbia.edu/. But unless you happen to know the precise name of a manuscript or the collection it’s held in, it’s easiest to start by clicking “more highlights” on the home page. Initially I gaped at everything without discrimination, but after awhile it got easier to discern the high quality manuscripts from the low. While all are wonderous, a few stand out as true works of art. The Book of Kells is of course familiar to most, but of the hundreds I looked at my favorite by far is a manuscript at Harvard University’s Houghton Library -- the Calderini Pontificale dating from the late 14^th century Italy. It’s undoubtedly one of the most finely executed illuminated manuscripts in existence. Here are some goodies --